LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. fiT 1 O

Edited by E. Haldeman- Julius Jj[^

Voltaire and the

French
Enlightenment

WILL DURANT, Ph.D.

LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. ri^
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius *? A jL

Voltaire and the French
Enlightenment

Will Durant, Ph.D.

IMrector, Labor Temple School, New York.

Author of Philosophy and the Social Problem,

A Guide to Plato, Etc., Etc.

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
CIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright, 1924.
Haldeman-Julius Company

PRfNTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

VOLTAIRE AND THE FRENCH
ENLIGHTENMENT.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Page

I. FJaris: CEdipe 7

II. London: The Letters on the English. 20

III. Cirey: The Romances 24

IV. Potsdam and Frederick 34

V. Les Delices: The Essay on Morals. . .42

VI. Ferney : Candide 47

VII. The Encyclopedia and the Philosophic

Dictionary 59

VIII. itcrasez Dlnfame 65

IX. Voltaire and Rousseau 7S

X. Denouement 8S

VOLTAIRE AND THE FRENCH
ENLIGHTENMENT.

L PARIS: OED1PE.

At Paris in 1742 Voltaire was coaching Mile.
Dumesnil to rise to tragic heights in a rehearsal
of his play Merope. She complained that s.he
would have to have "the very devil" in her to
simulate such passion as he required. "That is
just it," answered Voltaire; "you must have the
devil in you, to succeed in any of the arts."*
Even his critics and his enemies admitted that
he himself met this requirement perfectly. "IZ
avait le diable, au corps — he had the devil in his
body," said Sainte-Beuve ; t and De Maistre
called him the man "into whose hands hell had
given all its powers."!!

Unprepossessing, ugly, vain, flippant, obscene,
unscrupulous, even at times dishonest, — Voltaire
was a man with the faults of his time and place,
missing hardly one. And yet this same Voltaire
turns out to have been tirelessly kind, consid-
erate, lavish of his energy and his purse, as
sedulous in helping friends as in crushing ene-

•Tallentyre, Life of Voltaire; third edition; p.
145.

t Portrait s of the Eighteenth Century; New York,
1905; vol. i, p. 196.

flBrandes, Main Curve™ +s in Nineteenth Century
'Aternture; vol. iii, p. 107.

t VOLTAIRE AND THE

mies, able to kill with a stroke of. his pen and
yet disarmed by the first advance of concilia-
tion; — so contradictory is man.

But all these qualities, good and bad, were
secondary, not of the essence of Voltaire; the
astounding and basic thing in him was the in-
exhaustible fertility and brilliance of his mind.
His works fill ninety-nine volumes, of which
every page is sparkling and fruitful, though
they range from subject to subject across the
world as fitfully and bravely as in an encyclo-
pedia. "My trade is to say what I think":*
and what he thought was always worth saying,
as what he said was always said incomparably
well. If we do not read him now (though mftn
like Anatole France have been formed to subtle-
ty and wisdom by poring over his pages), it is
because the theological battles which he fought
for us no longer interest us intimately; we have
passed on perhaps to other battlefields, and are
more absorbed with the economics of this life
than with the geography of the next; the very
thoroughness of Voltaire's victory over ecclesi-
asticism and superstition makes dead those
issues which he found alive. Much of his fame,
too, came of his inimitable conversation; but
scripta manent, verba volant — written words re-
main, while spoken words fly away, the winged
words of Voltaire with the rest. What is left to
us is too much the flesh of Voltaire, too little

•Tallentyre, p. 32.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 9

the divine fire of his spirit. And yet, darkly
as we see him through the glass of time, what
a spirit! — "sheer intelligence transmuting
anger into fun, fire into light";* "a creature of
air and flame, the most excitable that ever
lived, composed of more ethereal and more
throbbing atoms than those of other men; there
is none whose mental machinery Is more deli-
cate, nor whose equilibrium is at the same time
more shifting and more exact."t Was he, per-
haps, the greatest intellectual energy in all
history?

Certainly he worked harder, and accomplished
more, than any other man of his epoch. "Not
to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the
same thing," he said. "All people are good ex-
cept those who are idle." His secretary said
that he was a miser only of his time.ft "One
must give one's self all the occupation one can
to make life supportable in this world. . . .
The further I advance in life, the more I find
work necessary. It becomes in the long run
the greatest of pleasures, and takes the place of
the illusions of life. "J "If you do not want to
commit suicide always have something to do."§

Suicide must have been forever tempting him,
for he was ever at work. "It was because he

*J. M. Robertson, Voltaire; London, 1922 ; p. 67.
fTaine. The Ancient Regime; New York, 1876;
p. 262.

flVoltaire, Romances; New York, 1889 ; p. 12.
tin Sainte-Beuve, i, 226.
STallentyre, 93.

10 VOLTAIRE AND THE

was so thoroughly alive that he filled the whole
era with his life."* Contemporary with one of
the greatest of centuries (1694-1778), he was
the soul and essence of it. "To name Voltaire,"
said Victor Hugo, "is to characterize the entire
eighteenth century."t Italy had a Renaissance,
and Germany had a Reformation; but France
had Voltaire; he was for his country both Re-
naissance and Reformation, and half the Rev-
olution. He carried on the antiseptic scepticism
of Montaigne, and the healthy earthy humor of
Rabelais; he fought superstition and corruption
more savagely and effectively than Luther or
Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon; he
helped to make the powder with which Mira-
beau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew
up the Old Regime. "If we judge of men by
what they have done," said Lamartine, "then
Voltaire is incontestably the greatest writer of
modern Europe. . . . Destiny gave him
eighty-three years of existence, that he might
slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the
time to combat time; and when he fell he was
the cbnqueror."fl

No, never has a writer had in his lifetime
such influence. Despite exile, imprisonment,
and the suppression of almost every one of his
books by the minions of church and state, he

•Morley, Voltaire; London, 1878; p. 14.
tCentenary address on Voltaire.
ti Romance 8, {>[•. u and ix.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT _i

forged fiercely a path for his truth, until at
last kings, popes and emperors catered to him,
thrones trembled before him, and half the world
listened to catch his every word. It was an
age in which many things called for a destroyer.
"Laughing lions must come:"* well, Voltaire
came, and "annihilated with laughter."t He
and Rousseau were the two voices of a vast
process of economic and political transition
from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the mid-
dle class. When a rising class is inconvenienced
by existing law or custom it appeals from cus-
tom to reason and from law to nature — just as
conflicting desires in the individual sparkle
into thought. So the wealthy bourgeoisie sup-
ported the rationalism of Voltaire and the nat-
uralism of Rousseau; it was necessary to loosen
old habits and customs, to renovate and invig-
orate feeling and thought, to open the mind to
experiment and change, before the great Rev-
olution could come. Not that Voltaire and Rous-
seau were the causes of the Revolution; perhaps
rather they were co-results with it of the forces
that seethed and surged beneath the political
and social surface of French life; they were
the accompanying light and brilliance of the
volcanic heat and conflagration. Philosophy is
to history as reason is to desire: in either case

•Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
tBrandes, 57.

12 VOLTAIRE AND THE

an unconscious process determines from below
the conscious thought above.

Yet we must not bend back too far in attempt-
ing to correct the philosopher's tendency to ex-
aggerate the influence of philosophy. Louis XVI,
seeing in his prison Temple the works of Vol-
taire and Rousseau, said, "Those two men have
destroyed France,,,* — meaning his dynasty.
"The Bourbons might have preserved them-
selves," said Napoleon, "if they had controlled
writing materials. The advent of cannon killed
the feudal system; ink will kill the modern so-
cial organization."! "Books rule the world,"
said Voltaire, "or at least those nations in it
which have a written language; the others do
not count." "Nothing enfranchises like educa-
tion";— and he proceeded to enfranchise France.
"When once a nation begins to think, it is im-
possible to stop it."fl But with Voltaire, France
began to think.

"Voltaire," that is to say, Francois Marie
Arouet, was born at Paris in 1694, the son of a
comfortably successful notary and a somewhat
aristocratic mother. He owed to his father,
perhaps, his shrewdness and irascibility, and to
his mother something of his levity and wit. He
came into the world, so to speak, by a narrow

♦Tallentyre, 526.

tBertaut, Napoleon in His Own Words; Chicago,
1916; p. 63.

flTallentyre, 101.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 13

margin: his mother did not survive his birth;
and he was so puny and sickly an infant that
the nurse did not give him more than a day to
live. She was slightly in error, as he lived
almost to eighty-four; but all through his life
his frail body tormented with illness his un-
conquerable spirit.

He had for his edification a model elder
brother, Armand, a pious lad who fell in love
with the Jansenist heresy, and courted martyr-
dom for his faith. "Well," said Armand to a
friend who advised the better part of valor,
"if you do not want to be hanged, at least do
not put off other people." The father said he
had two fools for his sons — one in verse and
the other in prose. The fact that Francois
made verses almost as soon as he could write
his name, convinced his very practical father
that nothing good would come of him. But the
famous hetaira, Ninon de l'Enclos, who lived in
the provincial town to which the Arouets had
returned after the birth of Frangois, saw in the
youth the signs of greatness; and when she
died she left him 2,000 francs for the purchase
of books. His early education came from these,
and from a dissolute abbe (a Jerome Coignard
in the flesh) who taught him scepticism along
with his prayers. His later educators, the
Jesuits, gave him the very instrument of scep-
ticism by teaching him dialectic — the art of
proving anything, and therefore at last the

14 VOLTAIRE AND THE

habit of believing nothing. Frangois became an
adept at argument: while the boys played games
in the fields, he, aged twelve, stayed behind to
discuss theology with the learned. When the
time came for him to earn his living, he scan-
dalized his father by proposing to take up liter-
ature as profession. "Literature," said M.
Arouet, "is the profession of the man who
wishes to be useless to society and a burden to
his relatives, and to die of hunger"; — one can
see the table trembling under his emphasis. So
Frangois went in for literature.

Not that he was a quiet and merely studious
lad; he burnt the midnight oil — of others. He
took to staying out late, frolicking with the
wits and roisterers of the town, and experiment-
ing with the commandments; until his exas-
perated father sent him off to a relative at
Caen, with instructions to keep the youth prac-
tically in confinement. But his jailer fell in
love with his wit, and soon gave him free rein.
After imprisonment, now as later, came exile:
his father sent him to the Ha^ue with the
French ambassador, requesting strict surveil-
lance of the madcap boy; but Frangois at once
fell in love with a little lady, "Pimpette," held
breathless clandestine interviews with her, and
wTote to her passionate letters ending always
with the refrain, "I shall certainly love you
forever." The affair was discovered, and he

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 15

was sent home. He remembered Pimpette for
several weeks.

In 1715, proud of his twenty-one years, he
went to Paris, just in time to be in at the death
of Louis XIV. The succeeding Louis being too
young to govern France, much less Paris, the
power fell into the hands of a regent; and dur-
ing this quasi-interregnum life ran riot in the
capital of the world, and young Arouet ran with
it. He soon achieved a reputation as a brilliant
and reckless lad. When the Regent, for econ-
omy, sold half the horses that filled the royal
stables, Francois remarked how much more sen-
sible it would have been to dismiss half the
asses that filled the royal court. At last all the
bright and naughty things whispered about
Paris were fathered upon him; and it was his
ill luck that these included two poems accusing
the Regent of desiring to usurp the throne. The
Regent raged; and meeting the youth in the
park one day, said to him: "M. Arouet, I will
wager that I can show you something that you
have never seen "before." "What is that?" "The
inside of the Bastille." Arouet saw it the next
day, April 16, 1717.

While in the BastiMe, he adopted, for some
unknown reason, the pen-name of Voltaire,*
and became a poet in earnest and at length.

♦Carlyle thought it an anagram for A-r-o-u-e-t
I. j. (le jeuiie, the younger;. But the name seems
to have occurred among the family- of Voltaire's
mother.

16 VOLTAIRE AND THE

Before he had served eleven months he had
written a long and not unworthy epic, the Herir
riade, telling the story of Henry of Navarre.
Then the Regent, having discovered, perhaps,
that he had imprisoned an innocent man, re-
leased him and gave him a pension; whereupon
Voltaire wrote thanking him for so taking care
of his board, and begging permission hereafter
to take care of his lodging himself.*

He passed now almost with a bound from the
prison to the stage. His tragedy, CEdipe, was
produced in 1718, and broke all the records of
Paris by running for forty-five consecutive
nights. His old father, come to upbraid him,
sat in a box, and covered his joy by grumbling,
at every hit, "Oh, the rascal! the rascal!"
When the poet Fontenelle met Voltaire after
the play and damned it with high praise, say-
ing it was "too brilliant for tragedy,*' Voltaire
replied, smiling, "I must re-read your pas-
torals, "t The youth was in no mood for cau-
tion or for courtesy; had he not put into the
play itself these reckless lines? —

Our priests are not what simple folk suppose ;
Their learning is but our credulity.

(Act. iv, scene 1) ;

and into the mouth of Araspe this epoch-making
challenge? —

•Hugo, Centenary Address.
tRobertson, 67.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 17

Let us trust but to ourselves, see all with our own

eyes ;
Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.

(ii, f).

The play netted Voltaire 4,000 francs, which
he proceeded to invest with a wisdom unheard
of in literary men; through all his tribulations
he kept the art not merely of making a spacious
income, but of putting it to work; he respected
the classic adage that one must live before one
can philosophize. In 1729 he bought up all the
tickets in a poorly planned governmental lot-
tery, and made a large sum, much to the anger
of the Government. But as he became rich he
became ever more generous; and a growing
circle of prot£g£s gathered about him as he
passed into the afternoon of life.

It was well that he added an almost Hebraic
cleverness of finance to his Gallic cleverness
of pen; for his next play, Artcmire, failed. Vol-
taire felt the failure keenly; every triumph
sharpens the sting of later defeats. He was
always painfully sensitive to public opinion, and
envied the animals because they do not knpw
what people say of them. Fate added to his
dramatic failure a bad case of small-pox; he
cured himself by drinking 120 pints of lemon-
ade, and somewhat less of physic. When he
came out of the shadow of death he found that
his Hcjiriadc had made him famous; he boasted,
with reason, that he had made poetry the fash-
ion. He was received and feted everywhere;

18 VOLTAIRE AND THE

the aristocracy caught him up and turned him
into a polished man of the world, an unequalled
master of conversation, and the inheritor of
the finest cultural tradition in Europe.

For eight years he basked in the sunshine
of the salons; and then fortune turned away.
Some of the aristocracy could not forget that
this young man had no other title to place and
honor than that of genius, and could not quite
forgive him for the distinction. During a din-
ner at the Due de Sully's chateau, after Voltaire
had held forth for some minutes with un-
abashed eloquence and wit, the Chevalier de
Rohan asked, not sotto voce, "Who is the young
man who talks so loud?" "My Lord," answered
Voltaire quickly, "he is one who does not carry
a great name, but wins respect for the name
he has." To answer the Chevalier at all was
impertinence; to answer him unanswerably was
treason. The honorable Lord engaged a band
of ruffians to assault Voltaire by night, merely
cautioning them, "Don't hit his head; some-
thing good may come out of that yet." The
next day, at the theatre, Voltaire appeared,
bandaged and limping, walked up to Rohan's
box, and challenged him to a duel. Then he
went home and spent all day practising with
the foils. But the noble Chevalier had no mind
to be precipitated into heaven, or elsewhere,
by a mere genius; he appealed to his cousin,
who was Minister of Police, to protect him.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 19

Voltaire was arrested, and found himself again
in his old home, the Bastille, privileged once
more to view the world from the inside. He
was almost immediately released, on condition
that he go into exile in England. He went;
but after being escorted to Dover he recrossed
the Channel in disguise, burning to avenge
himself. Warned that he had been discovered,
and was about to be arrested a third time, he
took ship again, and reconciled himself to three
years in England (1726-29).

20 VOLTAIRE AND THE

II. LONDON: THE LETTERS ON THE ENGLISH.

He set to work with courage to master the
new language. He was displeased to find that
plague had one syllable and ague two; he
wished that plague would take one-half the
language, and ague the other half. But soon
he could read English well; and within a year
he was master of the best English literature of
the age. He was introduced to the literati by
Lord Bolingbroke, and dined with one after
another of them, even with the elusive and cor-
rosive Dean Swift. He pretended to no pedigree,
and asked none of others: when Congreve spoke
of his own plays as trifles, and desired to be
considered rather a gentleman of leisure than
an author, Voltaire said to him sharply, "If
you had had the misfortune to be only a gen-
tleman like any other, I should never have
come to see you."

What surprised him was the freedom with
which Bolingbroke, Pope, Addison, and Swift
wrote whatever they pleased; here was a peo-
ple that had opinions of its own; a people that
had remade its religion, hanged its Ring, im-
ported another, and built a parliament stron^.r
than any king in Europe. There was no Bas-
tille here, and no lettres de caehet by which
titled pensioners or royal idlers could send
their untitled foes to jail without cause and

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 21

without trial. Here were thirty religions, and
not one priest. Here was the boldest sect of
all, the Quakers, who astonished all Christen-
dom by behaving like Christians. Voltaire
never to the end of his life ceased to wonder
at them: in the Dictionnaire PhllosopMqu* he
makes one of them say: "Our God, who haB
bidden us love our enemies and suffer evii
without complaint, assuredly has no mind that
we should cross the sea to go and cut the
throats of our brothers because murderers in
red clothes and hats two feet high enlist citi-
zens by making a noise with two sticks on an
ass's skin."

It was an England, too, that throbbed with a
virile intellectual activity. Bacon's name was
still in the air, and the inductive mode of ap-
proach was triumphing in every field. Hobbes
(1588-1679) had carried out the sceptical spirit
of the Renaissance, and the practical spirit of
his master, into so complete and outspoken a
materialism as would have won him in France
the honor of martyrdom for a fallacy. Locke
(1632-1704) had written a masterpiece of in-
ductive psychological analysis (the Essay on
the Human Understanding, 1689), without so
much as mentioning the soul. Collins, Tyndal
and other deists were re-affirming their faith
in God while calling into question every other
doctrine of the established church. Newton
had just died: Voltaire attended the funeral,

VOLTAIRE A XD THE

and spoke repeatedly of the impression made
upon him by the national honors awarded to
this modest Englishman. "Not long ago," he
writes, "a distinguished company were dis-
cussing the trite and frivolous question, who
was the greatest man, — Caesar, Alexander,
Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Some one answered
that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And
rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds
by the force of truth, and not to those who en-
slave them by violence, that we owe our rever-
ence."* Voltaire became a patient and thor-
ough student of Newton's works, and was later
the chief protagonist of Newton's views in
France.

One must marvel at the quickness with
which Voltaire absorbed almost all that Eng-
land had to teach him — its literature, its sci-
ence, and its philosophy; he took all these
varied elements, passed them through the fire
of French culture and the French spirit, and
transmuted them into the gold of Gallic wit
and eloquence. He recorded his impressions
in Letters on the English, which he circulated
in manuscript among his friends; he did not
dare to print them, for they praised "perfid-
ious Albion" too highly to suit the taste of the
royal censor. They contrasted English political
liberty and intellectual independence with

^Letters on the English, xiii : in Morley 52.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 24

French tyranny and bondage;* they condemned
the idle aristocracy and the tithe-absorbing
clergy of France, with their perpetual recourse
to the Bastille as the answer to every question
and every doubt; they urged the middle classes
to rise to their proper place in the state, as
these classes had in England. Without quite
knowing or intending it, these letters were the
first cock's crow of the Revolution.

♦Diderot was jailed six months for his Letter on
the Blind; Buff on in 1751, was made to retract
publicly his teachings on the antiquity of the earth ;
Freret was sent to the Bastille for a critical in-
quiry into the origins of the royal power in France ;
books continued to be burned officially by the pub-
lic hangman till 1788, as also after the Restoration
in 1815 ; in 1757 an edict pronounced the death
penalty for any author who should "attack reli-
gion,"— i.e., call in question any dogma of the tra-
ditional faith. — Robertson, 73, 84, 105, 107 ; Pellis-
sier, Voltaire Philosophe, Paris, 1908, p. 92; Buckle,
History of Civilisation, New York, 1913; Vol. I.,
etc.

24 VoLTAIRE AND THE

> III. CIREY: THE ROMANCES.

Nevertheless the Regent, not knowing of this
chanticleer, sent Voltaire permission, in 1729,
to return to France. For five years Voltaire
enjoyed again that Parisian life whose wine
flowed in his veins and whose spirit flowed
from his pen. And then some miscreant of a
publisher, getting hold of the Letters on the
English, turned them, without the author's per-
mission, into print, and sold them far and wide,
to the horror of all good Frenchmen, including
Voltaire. The Parliament of Paris at once or-
dered the book to be publicly burned as "scan-
dalous, contrary to religion, to morals, and to
respect for authority,"; and Voltaire learned
that he was again on the way to the Bastille.
Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels
— merely utilizing the occasion to elope with
another man's wife.

The Marquise du Chatelet was twenty-eight;
Voltaire, alas, was already forty. She - was a
remarkable woman: she had studied mathe-
matics with the redoubtable Maupertuis, and
then with Clairaut; she had written a learnedly
annotated translation of Newton's Principia;
she was soon to receive higher rating than
Voltaire in a contest for a prize offered by the
French Academy for an essay on the physics

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 2.",

of fire; in short she was precisely the kind of
woman who never elopes. But the Marquis
was so dull, and Voltaire was so interesting —
"a creature lovable in every way," she called
him; "the finest ornament in France."* He
returned her love with fervent admiration;
called her "a great man whose only fault was
being a woman"; formed from her, and from
the large number of highly talented women
then in France, his conviction of the native
mental equality of the sexes ;t and decided that
her chateau at Cirey was an admirable refuge
from the inclement political weather of Paris.
The Marquis was away with his regiment,
which had long been his avenue of escape from
mathematics; and he made no objection to the
new arrangements. Because of the mariages
de convenances which forced rich old men on
young women who had no taste for senility,
but much hunger for romance, the morals of
the day permitted a lady to add a lover to her
manage, if it were done with a decent respect
for the hypocrisies of mankind; and if she
chose not merely a lover but a genius, all the
world smiled and forgave her.

In the chateau at Cirey they did not spend

♦In Sainte-Beuve, i, 206.

tTallentyre, 207. Contrast Voltaire's "God creat-
ed woman only to tame mankind" (L'Ingenu, in
Romances, 309), with Meredith's "Woman will be
the last thine- civilized by man" {Ordeal of Richard
Fever el, p. 1).

26 VOLTAIRE AND THE

their time billing and cooing. All the day was
taken up with study and research; Voltaire
had an expensive laboratory fitted up for work
in natural science; and for years the lovers
rivaled each other in discovery and disquisi-
tion. They had many guests, but it was under-
stood that these should entertain themselves
all day long, till supper at nine. After supper,
occasionally, there were private theatricals; or
Voltaire would read to the guests one of his
lively stories. Very soon Cirey became the
Mecca of the French mind; the aristocracy and
the bourgeoisie joined in the pilgrimage to
taste Voltaire's wine and wit, and see him act
in his own plays. He was happy to be the
center of this corrupt and brilliant world; he
took nothing too seriously, and for a while
made "Rire et faire rive" his motto.* Catherine
of Russia called him "the divinity of gayety."
"If Nature had not made us a little frivolous,"
he said, "we should be most wretched. It is
because one can be frivolous that the majority
do not hang themselves." There was nothing
of the dyspeptic Carlyle about him. "Dulce est
dcsiperc in locoA Woe to philosophers who
cannot laugh away their wrinkles. I look upon
solemnity as a disease."!!

It was now that he began to write those de-
lightful romances — Zadig, Candide, Microme'gas,

*"To laugh and to make laugh."

t"H to be foolish on occasion."

to Frederick the Great, July 1737.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 27

L'Ingenu, he Monde comme il va, etc. — which
give the Voltairean spirit in purer from than
anywhere else in his ninety-nine volumes. They
are not novels, but humoresque-picaresque
novelettes; the heroes are not persons but
ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the
events are thoughts. Some are mere frag-
ments, like L'Ingenu, which is Rousseau before
Jean Jacques. A Huron Indian comes to France
with some returning explorers; the first prob-
lem to which he gives rise is that of making
him a Christian. An abbe gives him a copy
of the New Testament, which the Huron likes
so much that he soon offers himself not only
for baptism but for circumcision as well.
"For," he says, "I do not find in the book
that was put into my hands a single person
who was not circumcised. It is therefore evi-
dent that I must make a sacrifice to the He-
brew custom, and the sooner the better."
Hardly has this difficulty been smoothed over
when he has trouble over confession; he asks
where in the Gospel this is commanded, and
is directed to a passage in the Epistle of St.
James — "Confess your sins to one another." He
confesses; but "when he had done he dragged
the abbe from the confessional chair, placed
himself in the seat, and bade the abbe confess
in turn. "Come, my friend; it is said, 'We
must confess our sins to one another'; I have
related my sins to you, and you shall not stir

28 VOLTAIRE AND THE

till you recount yours." He falls in love with
Miss St. Yves, but is told that he cannot marry
her because she has acted as godmottfer at his
baptism; he is very angry at this little trick
of the fates, and threatens to get unbaptized.
Having received permission to marry her, he
is surprised to find that for marriage "notaries,
priests, witnesses, contracts and dispensations
are absolutely necessary. . . . 'You are then
very great rogues, since so many precautions
are required.* " And* so, as the story passes
on from incident to incident, the contradictions
between primitive and ecclesiastical Christian-
ity are forced upon the stage; one misses the
impartiality of the scholar and the leniency of
the philosopher; but Voltaire had begun his
war against superstition, and in war wTe de-
mand impartiality and leniency only of our
foes.

Micromegas is an imitation of Swift, but per-
haps richer than its model in cosmic imagina-
tion. The earth is visited by an inhabitant
from Sirius; he is some 500,000 feet tall, as
befits the citizen of so large a star. On his
way through space he has picked up a gentle-
man from Saturn, who grieves because he is
only a few thousand feet in height. As they
walk through the Mediterranean the Sirian
wets his heels. He asks his comrade how
many senses the Saturnians have and is
told: "We have seventy-two, but we are daily

r:; X'LIGHTEXME

complaining of the small number." "To what
age do you commonly live?" "Alas, a mere
trifle; . . . very few on our globe survive
45,000 years. So you see that in a manner we
begin to die the very moment we are born:
our existence is no more than a point, our dura-
tion an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce
do we begin to learn a little when death in-
tervenes before we can profit by experience."*
As they stand in the sea they take up a ship
as one might pick up some animalcule; and
the Sirian poises it on his thumb-nail, causing
much commotion among the human passengers.
'The chaplains of the ship repeated exorcisms,
the sailors swore, and the philosophers formed
a system" to explain this disturbance of the
laws of gravity. The Sirian bends down like
a darkening cloud and addresses them:

"O ye intelligent atoms, in whom the Suprem-3
Being hath been pLeased to manifest his omnisci-
ence and power, wittibut doubt your joys on this
earth must be pure and exquisite ; for being un-
encumbered with matter, and — to all appearance —
little else than soul, you must spend your lives in
the delights of pleasure and reflection, which are
the true enjoyments of a perfect spirit, True hap-
piness I have nowhere found ; but certainly here it
dwells."

"We have matter enough," answered one of the
philosophers, '"to do abundance of mischief . .

* Romances, 339 ; cf. Shaw's Back to Methuselah,
One of the most famous of Shaw's bon mots has its
prototype in Voltaire's Memnon the Philosopher,
who says, "I am afraid that our little terraqueous
globe is the mad-house of those hundred thousand
millions of worlds of which your lordship does me
the honor to speak." — lb id, 30 4.

30 VOLTAIRE AND THE

You must know, for example, that at this very
moment, while I am speaking, there are 100,000
animals of our own species, covered with hat3.
slaying an equal number of their fellow-creatures,
who wear turbans ; at least they are either slay-
ing or being slain ; and this has usually been the
case all over the earth from time immemorial."

"Miscreants !" cried the indignant Sirian ; "I have
a good mind to take two or three steps, and trample
the whole nest of such ridiculous assassins under
my feet."

"Don't give yourself the trouble," replied the
philosopher ; "they are industrious enough in se-
curing their own destruction. At the end of ten
years the hundredth part of these wretches will not
survive. . . . Besides, the punishment should
not be inflicted upon them, but upon those seden-
tary and slothful barbarians who, from their pal-
aces, give orders for murdering a million of men,
then solemnly thank God for their success."*

Next to Candide, which belongs to a later
period of Voltaire's life, the best of these tales is
Zadig, Zadig was a Babylonian philosopher,
"as wise as it is possible for men to be; . . .
he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever
been known in any age, — that is, little or noth-
ing at all." Jealousy made him imagine that
he was in love with Semira." In defending her
against robbers he was wounded in the left eye.

A messenger was despatched to Memphis for the
great Egyptian physician Hermes, who came with
a numerous retinue. He visited Zadig, and de-
clared that the patient would lose his eye. He
even foretold the day and . hour when this fatal
event would happen. "Had it been the right eye,"
said he, "I could easily have cured it ; but the
wounds of the left eye are incurable." All Babylon
lamented the fate of Zadig, and admired the pro-
found knowledge of Hermes. In two days the

•Ibid, 351.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT SI

abscess broke of its own accord, and Zadig was
perfectly cured. Hermes wrote a book to prove
that it ought not to have healed. Zadig did not
read it.*

He hurried, instead, to Semira, only to find
that upon hearing Hermes' first report she had
betrothed herself to another man, having, she
said, "an unconquerable aversion to one-eyed
men." Zadig thereupon married a peasant
woman, hoping to find in her the virtues which
had been missing in the court lady Semira. To
make sure of the fidelity of his wife, he ar-
ranged with a friend that he, Zadig, should pre-
tend to die, and that the friend should make
love to the wife an hour later. So Zadig had
himself pronounced dead, and lay in the coffin
while his friend first commiserated and then
congratulated the widow, and at last proposed
immediate marriage to her. She made a brief
resistance; and then, "protesting she would
ne'er consent, consented. "f Zadig rose from the
dead and fled into the woods to console himself
with the beauty of nature.

Having become a very wise man, he was made
vizier to the king, to whose realm he brought
prosperity, justice, and peace. But the queen
fell in love with him; and the king, perceiving
it, "began to be troubled. ... He particular-
ly remarked that the queen's shoes were blue,
and that Zadig's shoes were blue; that his

*lbkl, 40 f.

fByron, Don Juan, i.

32 VOLTAIRE AND THE

wife's ribbons were yellow, and that Zadig's
bonnet was yellow." He resolved to poison
them both; but the queen discovered the plot,
and sent a note to Zadig: "Fly, I conjure thee,
by our mutual love and our yellow ribbons!"
Zadig again fled into the woods.

He then represented to himself the human spe-
cies, as it really is, a-s a parcel of insects devour-
ing one another on a little atom of clay. This
true image seemed to annihilate his misfortunes,
by making him sensible of the nothingness of his
own being and that of Babylon. His soul launched
into infinity ; and detached from the senses, con-
templated the immutable order of the universe.
But when, afterwards, returning to himself, . . .
he considered that the Queen had perhaps died for
him, the universe vanished from sight.

Passing out of Babylon he saw a man cruelly
beating a woman; he responded to her cries for
help, fought the man, and at last, to save him-
self, struck a blow which killed his enemy.
Thereupon he turned to the lady and asked,
"What further, madam, wouldst thou have me
do for thee?" "Die, villain! for thou hast
killed my lover. Oh, that I were able to tear
out thy heart!"

Zadig was shortly afterward captured and en-
slaved; but he taught his master philosophy, and
became his trusted counsellor. Through his ad-
vice the practice of suttee (by which a widow
was buried with her husband) was abolished by
a law which required that before such martyr-
dom the widow should spend an hour alone with

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 33

a handsome man. Sent on a mission to the King
of Serendib, Zadig taught him that an honest
minister could best be found by choosing the
lightest dancer among the applicants: he had
the vestibule of the dance hall filled with loose
valuables, easily stolen, and arranged that each
candidate should pass through the vestibule
alone and unwatched; when they had all en-
tered, they were asked to dance. "'Never had
dancers performed more unwillingly or with
less grace. Their heads were down, their backs
bent, their hands pressed to their sides." — And
so the story rushes on. We can imagine those
evenings at Cirey!

34 VOLTAIRE AND THE

IV. POTSDAM AND FREDERICK.

Those who could not come to him wrote to
him. In 1736 began his correspondence with
Frederick, then Prince, and not yet Great.
Frederick's first letter was like that of a boy
to a king; its lavish flattery gives us an ink-
ling of the reputation which Voltaire — though
he had not yet written any of his masterpiecas
— had already won. It proclaims Voltaire as
"the greatest man of France, and a mortal who
does honor to language. ... I count it one
of the greatest honors of my life to be born the
contemporary of a man of such distinguished
attainments as yours. . . . It is not given to
every one to make the mind laugh"; and "what
pleasures can surpass those of the mind?"*
Frederick was a free-thinker, who looked upon
dogmas as a king looks upon subjects; and
Voltaire had great hopes that on the throne
Frederick would make the Enlightenment fash
ionable, while he himself, perhaps, might play
Plato to Frederick's Dionysius. When Fred-
erick demurred to the flattery with which Vol-
taire answered his own, Voltaire replied: "A
prince who writes against flattery is as singu-
lar as a pope who writes against infallibility."
Frederick sent him a copy of the Anti-Machia-

♦In Sainte-Beuve, i, 212-215.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 35

vel, in which the prince spoke very beautifully
of the iniquity of war, and of the duty of a
king to preserve peace; Voltaire wept tears of
joy over this royal pacifist. A few months
later Frederick, made king, invaded Silesia and
plunged Europe into a generation of bloodshed.

In 1745 the poet and his mathematician went
to Paris, when Voltaire became a candidate for
membership in the French Academy. To achieve
this quite superfluous distinction he called him-
self a good Catholic, complimented some power-
ful Jesuits, lied inexhaustibly, and in general
behaved as most of us do in such cases. He
failed; but a year later he succeeded, and de-
livered a reception address which is one of the
classics of the literature of France. For a
while he lingered in Paris, flitting from salon
to salon, and producing play after play. From
(Edipe at eighteen to Irene at eighty-three he
wrote a long series of dramas, some of them
failures, most of them successes. In 1730
Brutus failed, and in 1732 Eriphyle failed; his
friends urged him to abandon the drama; but
in the same year he produced Zaire, which be-
came his greatest success. Mahomet followed
in 1741, Merope in 1743, Semiramis in 1748, and
Tancrcde in 1760.

Meanwhile tragedy and comedy had entered
his own life. After fifteen years, his love for
Mme. du Chatelet had somewhat thinned; they
had even ceased to quarrel. In 1748 the Mar-

VOLTAIRE AND THE

qiiise fell in love with the handsome young
Marquis de Saint-Lambert. When Voltaire dis-
covered it he raged; but when Saint-Lambert
asked his forgiveness he melted into a benedic-
tion. He had reached the crest of life now, and
began to see death in the distance; he could
not take it ill that youth should be served.
"Such are women," he said philosophically (for-
getting that there are such men too): "I dis-
placed Richelieu, Saint-Lambert turns me out!
That is the order of things; one nail drives out
another; so goes the world."* He wrote a
pretty stanza to the third nail:

Saint-Lambert, it is all for thee

The flower grows ;
The rose's thorns are all for rae ;

For thee the rose.

Then, in 1749, came the death of Mme. du
Chatelet in childbirth. It was characteristic
of the age that her husband and Voltaire and
Saint-Lambert should meet at he'* death-bed
with not one word of reproach, and indeed made
friends by their common loss.

Voltaire tried to forget his bereavement in
work; for a time he busied himself with his
Sifclc de Louis XIV; but what rescued him
from despondency was the opportune renewal
of Frederick's invitation to come to his court
at Potsdam. An invitation accompanied by

•In Sainte-Beuve, i, 211.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 3/

3,000 francs for traveling expenses was irre-
sistible. Voltaire left for Berlin in 1750.

It soothed him to find himself assigned to
a splendid suite in Frederick's palace, and ac-
cepted on equal terms by the most powerful
monarch of the age. At first his letters were
full of satisfaction: writing on July 24 to
d'Argental he describes Potsdam — "150,000 sol-
diers; . . . opera, comedy, philosophy, poetry,
grandeur and graces, grenadiers and muses,
trumpets and violins, the suppers of Plato, so-
ciety and liberty, — who would believe it? Yet
it is very true." Years before, he had written:
uMon Dieu! . . . what a delightful life it
would be to lodge with three or four men of
letters with talents and no jealousy" (what
imagination!), "to love one another, live quiet-
ly, cultivate one's art, talk of it, enlighten our-
selves mutually! — I picture to myself that I
shall some day live in this little Paradise."*
And here it was!

Voltaire avoided the state dinners; he could
not bear to be surrounded with bristling gen-
erals; he reserved himself for the private sup-
pers to which Frederick, later in the evening,
would invite a small inner circle of literary
friends; for this greatest prince of his age
yearned to be a poet and a philosopher. The
conversation at these suppers was always in

*Ibid, i, 193.

38 VOLTAIRE AND THE

French; Voltaire tried to learn German, but
gave it up after nearly choking: and wished
the Germans had more wit and fewer conso-
nants.* One who heard the conversation said
that it was better than the most interesting
and best-written book in the world. They talked
about everything, and said what they thought.
Frederick's wit was almost as sharp as Vol-
taire's; and only Voltaire dared to answer him,
with that finesse which can kill without giving
offense. "One thinks boldly, one is free here,"
wrote Voltaire joyfully. Frederick "scratches
with one hand, but caresses with the other . . .
I am crossed in nothing ... I find a port after
fifty years of storm. I find the protection of a
king, the conversation of a philosopher, the
charms of an agreeable man, united in one who
for sixteen years consoled me in misfortune and
sheltered me from my enemies. If one can be
certain of anything it is of the character of the
King of Prussia."f However .

In November of this same year Voltaire
thought he would improve his finances by in-
vesting in Saxon bonds, despite Frederick's pro-
hibition of such investments. The bonds rose,
and Voltaire profited; but his agent, Hirsch,
tried to blackmail him by threatening to pub-
lish the transaction. Voltaire "sprang at his
throat and sent him sprawling." Frederick

•Brandes, Main Currents, i, 3.
tTalli'iir I I'AO.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 39

learned of the affair and fell into a royal rage.
"I shall want him at the most another year,"
he said to La Mettrie; "one squeezes tfie orange
and throws away the rind." La Mettrie, per-
haps anxious to disperse his rivals, took care
to report this to Voltaire. The suppers were
resumed, "but," wrote Voltaire, "the orange rind
haunts my dreams . . . The man who fell
from the top of a steeple, and finding^the fall-
ing through the air soft, said, 'Good, provided
it lasts/ was not a little as I am."

He half desired a break; for he was as home-
sick as only a Frenchman can be. The de-
cisive trifle came in 1752. Maupertuis, the
great mathematician whom Frederick had im-
ported from France with so many others in an
attempt to arouse the German mind by direct
contact with the "Enlightenment," quarreled
with a subordinate mathematician, Koenig, over
an interpretation of Newton. Frederick en-
tered into the dispute on the side of Mauper-
tuis; and Voltaire, who had more courage than
caution, entered it on the side of Koenig. "Un-
luckily for me," he wrote to Mme. Denis, "I am
also an author, and in the opposite camp to the
King. I have no sceptre, but I have a pen."
About the same time Frederick was writing to
his sister: "The devil is incarnate in my men
of letters; there is no doing anything with
them. These fellows have no intelligence ex-
cept for society. ... It must be a consola-

40 VOLTAIRE AND THE

tion to animals to see that people with minds
are often no better than they."* It was now
that Voltaire wrote against Maupertuis his
famous "Diatribe of Dr. Akakia." He read it
to Frederick, who laughed all night over it,
but begged Voltaire not to publish it. Voltaire
seemed to acquiesce; but the truth was that the
thing wras already sent to the printer, and
the author could not bring himself to practise
infanticide on the progeny of his pen. When it
appeared Frederick burst into flame, and Vol-
taire fled from the conflagration.

At Frankfort, though in territory quite out-
side Frederick's jurisdiction, he was overtaken
and arrested by the King's agents, and told
that he could not go on until he surrendered
Frederick's poem, the Palladium, which had not
been adapted for polite society, and out-Pucelled
Voltaire's Pucellc itself. But the terrible manu-
script was in a trunk which had been lost on
the way; and for weeks, till it came, Voltaire
was kept almost in prison. A book-seller to
whom he owed something thought it an oppor-
tune moment to come and press for the payment
of his bill; Voltaire, furious, gave him a blow
on the ear; wThereupon Voltaire's secretary,
Collini, offered comfort to the man by pointing
out, "Sir, you have received a box on the ear
from one of the greatest men in the world."t

♦In Sainte-Beuve, i, 2 IS.
tMorley, 146.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 41

Freed at last, he was about to cross the
frontier into France, when word came that he
was exiled. The hunted old soul hardly knewr
where to turn; for a time he thought of going
to Pennsylvania — one may imagine his des-
peration. He spent the March of 1754 seeking
"an agreeable tomb" in the neighborhood of
Geneva, safe from the rival autocrats of Paris
and Berlin; at last he bought an old estate
called Les DeJices; settled down to cultivate
his garden and regain his health; and when his
life seemed to be ebbing away into senility,
entered upon the period of his noblest and
greatest work.

42 VOLTAIRE AND THE

V. LES DELICES: THE ESSAY ON MORALS.

What was the cause of his new exile? That
he had published in Berlin "the most ambitious,
the most voluminous, the most characteristic,
and the most daring of his works."* Its title
was no small part of it: Essai sur les mocurs
et Vesprit des Nations, et sur les principaux
faits de Vhistoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu'a
Louis XIII — an Essay on the Morals and the
Spirit of the Nations from Charlemagne to
Louis XIII. He had begun it at Cirey for Mme.
du Chatelet, spurred on to the task by her de-
nunciation of history as she is writ. It is "an
old almanac/' she had said. "What does it
matter to me, a Frenchwoman living on my
estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin in
Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Orto-
grul? I have read with pleasure the history
of the Greeks and the Romans; they offered
me certain pictures which attracted me. But I
have never yet been able to finish any long
history of our modern nations. I can see scarce-
ly anything in them but confusion; a host of
minute events without connection or sequence,
a thousand battles which settled nothing. I
renounced a study which overwhelms the mind
without illuminating it." Voltaire had agreed;

•Tallentyre, 291.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 43

he had made his Ingenu say, "History is noth-
ing more than a picture of crimes and misfor-
tunes"; and he was to write to Horace Walpole
(July 15, 1768): "Truly the history of the
Yorkists and Lancastrians, and many others, is
much like reading the history of highway rob-
bers." But he had expressed to Mme. du Chate-
let the hope that a way out might lie in apply-
ing philosophy to history, and endeavoring to
trace, beneath the flux of political events, the
history of the human mind.* "Only philoso-
phers should write history,'' he said.t "In all
nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at
last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and
when it does finally arrive in the midst of this
darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded
by centuries of error, that it can hardly un-
deceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monu-
ments heaped up to prove lies."!! "History,"
he concludes, "is after all nothing but a pack of
tricks which we play upon the dead";! we
transform the past to suit our wishes for the
future, and in the upshot "history proves that
anything can be proved by history."

He worked like a miner to find in this "Mis-
sissippi of falsehoods'^ the grains of truth
about the real history of mankind. Year after

♦Robertson, 23 ; Morley, 215 ; Tallentyre, Voltaire
in His Letters, New York, 1919, p. 222.
tPellissier, 213.

%Essai sur les Moeurs, Introduction,
iln Morley, 220.
JMatthew Arnold's description of history.

44 VOLTAIRE AND THE

year he gave himself to preparatory studies:
a History of Russia, a History of Charles XII,
The Age of Louis XIV, and The Ag? of Louis
XIII; and through these tasks he developed in
himself that unflagging intellectual conscience
which enslaves a man to make a genius. "The
Jesuit Pere Daniel, who produced a History of
France, had placed before him in the Royal
Library of Paris 1,200 volumes of documents
and manuscripts; spent an hour or so looking
through them, and then, turning to Father
Tournemine, the former teacher of Voltaire, dis-
missed the matter by declaring that all this
material was 'useless old paper which he had
no need of for the purpose of writing his his-
tory.' "* Not so Voltaire: he read everything
on his subject that he could lay his hands on;
he pored over hundreds of volumes of memoirs;
he wrote hundreds of letters to survivors of
famous events; and even after publishing his
works he continued to study, and improved
every edition.

But this gathering of material was only pre-
paratory; what was needed was a new method
of selection and arrangement. Mere facts would
not do — even if, as so seldom happens, they
chanced to be facts. "Details that lead to noth-
ing are to history what baggage is to an army,
impedimenta ; for we must look at things in
the large, for the very reason that the human

♦Brandes, Francois de Voltaire.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 45

mind is so small, and sinks under the weight
of minutiae."* "Facts" should be collected by
annalists and arranged in some kind of his-
torical dictionary where one might find them
at need, as one finds words. ^Vhat Voltaire
sought was a unifying principle by which the
whole history of civilization in Europe could be
woven on one thread; and he was convinced
that this thread was the history of culture.
He was resolved that his history should deal
not with kings but with movements, forces, and
masses; not with nations but with the human
race; not with wars but with the march of the
human mind. "Battles and revolutions are
ic smallest part of the plan; squadrons and
battalions conquering or being conquered, towns
taken and retaken, are common to all history.
. . . Take away the arts and the progress of
the mind, and you will find nothing" in any
age "remarkable enough to attract the attention
of posterity. "t

And so he produced the first history of phil-
osophy— the first systematic attempt to trace
the streams of natural causation in the develop-
ment of the Ehiropean mind; it was to be ex-
pected that such an experiment should follow
upon the abandonment of supernatural expla-
nations: history could not come into its own
until theology gave way. According to Buckle,

♦In Morley, 275.

rYoltaij-e m His Letters, 40-41.

46 VOLTAIRE AND THE

Voltaire's book laid the basis of modern his-
torical science; Gibbon, Niebhur, Buckle and
Grote were his grateful debtors and followers;
he was the caput Nili of them all, and is still
unsurpassed in the field which he first explored.

But why did his greatest book bring him
exile? Because, by telling the truth, it of-
fended everybody. It especially enraged the
clergy by taking the view later developed by
Gibbon, that the rapid conquest of paganism by
Christianity had disintegrated Rome from with-
in and prepared it to fall an easy victim to the
invading and immigrating barbarians. It en-
raged them further by giving much less space
than usual to Judea and Christendom, and by
speaking of China, India and Persia, and of
their faiths, with the impartiality of a Martian;
in this new perspective a vast and novel world
was revealed; every dogma faded into rela-
tivity; the endless East took on something of
the proportions given it by geography; Europe
suddenly became conscious of itself as the ex-
perimental peninsula of a continent and a cul
ture greater than its own. How could k for-
give a European for so unpatriotic a revelation?
The King decreed that this Frenchman who
dared to think of himself as a man first and a
Frenchman afterward should never put foot
upon the soil of France again.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 47

VI. FERNEY: CA\DIDE.

Les Delices had been a temporary home, a
center from which Voltaire might prospect to
find a shelter of more permanence. He found
it in 175S at Ferney, just inside the Swiss line
near France; here he would be secure from the
French power, and yet near to French refuge if
the Swiss Government should trouble him. This
last change ended his 'Wanderjahre ; these fit-
ful runnings to and fro had not been all the re-
sult of his nervous restlessness; they had re-
flected, too, his ubiquitous insecurity from per-
secution; only at sixty-four did he find a house
that could be also his home. There is a pas-
sage at the end of one of his tales, "The Trav-
els of Scarmentado," which almost applies to
its author: 'As I had now seen all that was
rare, or beautiful on earth, I resolved for the
future to see nothing but my own home; I took
a Wife, and soon suspected that she deceived
me; but notwithstanding this doubt I still found
that of all conditions of life this was much the
happiest." He had no wife, but he had a niece
— which is better for a man of genius. "We
never hear of his wishing to be in Paris. . . .
There can be no doubt that this wise exile pro-
longed his days."*

•Morley, 239.

48 VOLTAIRE AND THE

He was happy in his garden, planting fruit
trees which he did not expect to see flourish in
his lifetime. When an admirer praised the
work he had done for posterity he answered,
"Yes, I hare planted 4,000 trees/' He had a
kind word for everybody, but could be forced
to sharper speech. One day he asked a visitor
whence he came. "From Mr. Haller's." "He is a
great man." said Voltaire; "a great poet, a great
naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a uni-
versal genius." "What you say, sir, is the more
admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the
same justice." "Ah," said Voltaire, "perhaps
we are both mistaken."*

Ferney now became the intellectual capital of
the world; every learned man or enlightened
ruler of the day paid his court either in person
or by correspondence. Here came sceptical
priests, liberal aristocrats, and learned ladies;
here came Gibbon and Boswell from England;
here came d'Alembert, Helvetius, and the other
rebels of the Enlightenment; and countless
others. At last the entertainment of this end-
less stream of visitors proved too expensive
even for Voltaire; he complained that he was
becoming the hotel-keeper for all Europe. To
one acquaintance who announced that he had
come to * stay for six weeks, Voltaire said:
"What is the difference between you and Don
Quixote? He mistook inns for chateaux, and

. re, 3 49.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 49

you mistake this chateau for an inn." "God
preserve me from my friends," he concluded;
"I will take care of my enemies myself."

Add to this perpetual hospitality, the largest
correspondence the world has ever seen, and the
most brilliant. Letters came from all sorts and
conditions of men: a burgomaster wrote from
Germany asking "in confidence whether there
is a God or not," and begging Voltaire to an-
swer by return post;* Gustavus III of Sweden
was elated by the thought that Voltaire some-
times glanced at the North, a,nd told him that
this was their greatest encouragement to do
their best up there; Christian VII of Denmark
apologized for not establishing at once all re-
forms; Catherine II of Russia sent him beau-
tiful presents, wrote frequently, and hoped he
would not consider her importunate. Even
Frederick, after a year of doldrums, returned
to the fold, and resumed his correspondence
with the King of Ferney.

"You have done me great wrongs," he wrote. I
have forgiven them all, and I even wish to forget
them. But if you had not had to do with a mad-
man in love with your noble genius, you would not
have gotten off so well. . . . Do you want
sweet things? Very well; I will tell you some
truths. I esteem in you the finest genius that the
ages have borne ; I admire your poetry, I love your
prose. . . . Never has an author before you
had a tact so keen, a taste so sure and delicate.
You are charming in conversation ; you know how
to amuse and instruct at the same time. You are

♦Morlcy, 335.

50 VOLTAIRE AND THE

the most seductive being that I know, capable of
making yourself loved by all the world when yon
choose. You have such graces of mind that you
can offend and yet at the same time deserve the
indulgence of those who know you. In short, you
would be perfect if you were not a man."*

Who would have expected so gay a host to
become the exponent of pessimism? In youth,
as a reveler in Paris's salons, he had seen the
sunnier side of life, despite the Bastille; and
yet even in those careless days he had rebelled
against the unnatural optimism to which Leib-
nitz had given currency. To an ardent young
man who had attacked him in print, and had
contended with Leibnitz that this is "the best
of all possible worlds," Voltaire wrote, "I am
pleased to hear, sir, that you have written a
little book against me. You do me too much
honor. . . . When you have shown, in verse
or otherwise, why so many men cut their
throats in the best of all possible worlds, I shall
be exceedingly obliged to you. I await your
arguments, your verses, and your abuse; and
assure you from the bottom of my heart that
neither of us knows anything about the mat-
ter. I have the honor to be," etc.

Persecution and disillusionment had worn
down his faith in life; and his experiences at
Berlin and Frankfort had taken the edge from
his hope. But both faith and hope suffered
most when, in November, 1755, came the news

•In Sainte-Beuve, i, 221.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 51

of the awful earthquake at Lisbon, in whtafr
30,000 people had been killed. The quake hadl
come on All Saints' Day; the churches had been
crowded with worshippers; and death, finding
its enemies in close formation, had reaped a
rich harvest. Voltaire was shocked into serious-
ness and raged when he heard that the French
clergy were explaining the disaster as a pun-
ishment for the sins of the people of Lisbon.
He broke forth in a passionate poem in which
he gave vigorous expression to the old dilemma:
Either God can prevent evil and he will not; or
he wishes to prevent it and he cannot. He was
not satisfied with Spinoza's answer that good
and evil are human terms, inapplicable to the
universe, and that our tragedies are trivial
things in the perspective of eternity.

I am a puny part of the great whole.

Yes ; but all animals condemned to live,

All sentient things, born by the same stern law,

Suffer like me, and like me also die.

The vulture fastens on his timid prey,

And stabs with bloody beak the quivering limbs :

All's well, it seems, for it. But in a while

An eagle tears the vulture into shreds ;

The eagle is transfixed by shafts of man ;

The man, prone in the dust of battlefields,

Mingling his blood with dying fellow men,

Becomes in turn the food of ravenous birds.

Thus the whole world in every member groans :

All born for torment and for mutual death.

And o'er this ghastly chaos you would say

The ills of each make up the good of all !

What blessedness ! And as, with quaking voice,.

Mortal and pitiful ye cry, "All's wen."

The universe belies 3rou, and your neart

Refutes a hundred times your mind's conceit. . . ,

,2 VOLTAIRE AND THE

What is the verdict of the vastest mind?
Silence : the book of fate is closed to us.
Man is a stranger to his own research ;
JHe knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes.
Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate ;
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars.
Our being mingles with the infinite ;
Ourselves we never see, or come to know.
This world, this theatre of pride and wrong,
Swarms with sick fools who talk of happiness. . .

Once did I sing, in less lugubrious tone,
The sunny ways of pleasure s genial rule ;
The times have changed, and, taught by growing

age,
And snaring of the frailty of mankind,
Seeking a light amid the deepening gloom,
I can but suffer, and will not repine.*

A few months later the Seven Years' War
broke out; Voltaire looked upon it as madness
and suicide, the devastation of Europe to settle
whether England or France should win "a few
acres of snow" in Canada. On the top of this
came a public reply, by Jean Jacques Rousseau,
to the poem on Lisbon. Man himself was to
be blamed for the disaster, said Rousseau; if we
lived out in the fields, and not in the towns,
we should not be killed on so large a scale; if
we lived under the sky, and not in houses,
houses would not fall upon us, Voltaire was
amazed at the popularity won by this profound
theodicy; and angry that his name should be
dragged into the dust by such a Quixote, he
turned upon Rousseau "that most terrible of all

•Selected Works of Voltaire: London, 1911; pp.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 53

the intellectual weapons ever wielded by man,
the mockery of Voltaire."* In three days, in
1751, he wrote Candide.

Never was pessimism so gaily argued; never
was man made to laugh so heartily while learn-
ing that this is a world of wroe. And seldom
has a story been told with such simple and hid-
den art; it is pure narrative and dialogue; no
descriptions pad it out; and the action is riot-
ously rapid. "In Voltaire's fingers," says Ana-
tole France, "the pen runs and laughs. "t It
is perhaps the finest short story in all litera-
ture.

Candide, as his name indicates, is a simple
and honest 'lad, son of the great Baron of Thun-
der-Ten-Trockh of Westphalia, and pupil of the
learned Pangloss.

Pangloss was professor of metaphysicotheologic-
ocosmonigology. . . . "It is demonstrable," said he,
"that all is necessarily for the best end. Observe
that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles
.... legs were visibly designed for stockings ....
stones were designed to construct castles .... pigs
were made so that we might have pork all the year
round. Consequently, they who assert that all is
well have said a foolish thing ; they should have
said all is for the best."

While Pangloss is discoursing, the castle is
attacked by the Bulgarian army, and Candide
is captured and turned into a soldier.

♦Tallentyre, 231.

flntrod. to Candide, Modern Library edition.

5 4 VOLTAIRE AND THE

He was made to wheel about to the right and
to the left, to draw his rammer, to return his ram-
mer, to present, to fire, to march. . . . He resolved,
one fine day in spring, to go for a walk, marching
straight before him, believing that it was a privi-
lege of the human as well as the animal species
to make use of their legs as they pleased. He
had advanced two leagues when he was overtaken
by four heroes six feet tall, who bound him and
carried him to a dungeon. He was asked which he
would like the best, to be whipped six and :hirty
times through all the regiment, or to receive at
once two balls of lead in his brain. He vainly
said that human will is free, and that he chose
neither the one nor the other. He was forced to
make a choice ; he determined, in virtue of that
gift of God called liberty, to run the gauntlet six-
and-thirty times. He bore this twice.*

Candide escapes, takes passage to Lisbon, and
on board ship meets Prof- Pangloss, who tells
how the Baron and Baroness were murdered
and the castle destroyed. "All this," he con-
cludes, "was indispensable; for private misfor-
tunes make the general good, so that the more
private misfortunes there are, the greater is the
general good." They arrive in Lisbon just in
time to be caught in the earthquake. After it is
over they tell each other their adventures and
sufferings; whereupon an old servant assures
them that their misfortunes are as nothing com-
pared with her own. "A hundred times I was
on the point of killing myself, but I loved life.
This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our
most fatal characteristics; for is there anything
more absurd than to wish to carry continually
a burden which one can always throw down?"

*Candid( . p.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 55

Or, as another character expresses it, "All
things considered, the life of a gondolier is pref-
erable to that of a doge; but I believe the dif-
ference is so trifling that it is not worth the
trouble of examining."

Candide, fleeing from the Inquisition, goes to
Paraguay; 'there the Jesuit Fathers possess
all, and the people nothing; it is a masterpiece
of reason and justice." In a Dutch colony he
comes upon a negro with one hand, one leg, and
a rag for clothing. "When we work at the
sugar canes," the slave explains, "and the mill
snatches hold of a finger, they cut off a hand;
and when we try to run away, they cut off a
leg. . . . This is the price at which you eat
sugar in Europe." Candide finds much loose
gold in the unexplored interior; he returns to
the coast and hires a vessel to take him to
France; but the skipper sails off with the gold
and leaves Candide philosophizing on the wharf.
With what little remains to him, Candide pur-
chases a passage on a ship bound for Bordeaux;
and on bo^rd strikes up a conversation with an
old sage, Martin.

"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have
always massacred one another as they do today,
that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors,
ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, glut-
tons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-
minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypo-
crites and fools?"

"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have
always eaten pigeons when they have found them?"

"Without doubt," said Candide.

56 VOLTAIRE AND THE

"Well, then," said Martin, "if hawks have al-
ways had the same character, why should you
imagine that men may have changed theirs?"

"Oh !" said Candide. "there is a vast deal of
difference, for free will — "

And reasoning thus they arrived at Bordeaux.*

We cannot follow Candide through the rest of
his adventures, which form a rollicking com-
mentary on the difficulties of medieval theol-
ogy and Leibnitzian optimism. After suffering
a variety of evils among a variety of men,
Candide settles down as a farmer in Turkey;
and the story ends with a final dialogue be-
tween master and pupil:

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide :
"There is a concatenation of events in this best
of all possible worlds : for if you had not been
kicked out of a magnificent castle ; ... if you had
not been put into the Inquisition ; if you had not
walked over America ; ... if you had not lost all
your gold ; . . . you would not be here eating pre-
served citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide ; "but
let us cultivate our garden."

*P. 104.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

VII. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA AND
THE PHILOSOPHIC DICTIONARY.

The popularity of so irreverent a book as
Candide gives us some sense of the spirit of
the age. The lordly culture of Louis XIV's time,
despite the massive bishops who spoke so elo-
quent a part in it, had learned to smile at
dogma and tradition. The failure of the Ref-
ormation to capture France had left for French-
men no half-way house between infallibility and
infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany
and England moved leisurely in the lines of re-
ligious evolution, the mind of France jumpecl
precipitately from the hot faith which mas-
sacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with
which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach and Di-
derot turned upon the religion of their fathers.
Let us look for a moment at the intellectual
environment in which the later Voltaire moved
and had his being-
La Mettrie (1709-51) was an army physician
who had lost his post by writing a Xatural His-
tory of the Soul, and had won exile by a work
called Man a Machine. He had taken refuge at
the court of Frederick, who was himself some-
thing of an advanced thinker and was resolved
to have the very latest culture from Paris. La
Mettrie took up the idea of mechanism where

58 VOLTAIRE AND THE

the frightened Descartes, like a boy who has
burned his fingers, had dropped it; and an-
nounced boldly that all the world, not except-
ing man, was a machine. The soul is material,
and matter is soulful; but whatever they are
they act upon each other, and grow and decay
with each other in a way that leaves no doubt
of their essential similarity and interdepend-
ence. If the soul is pure spirit, how ran enthu-
siasm warm the body, or fever in the body dis-
turb the processes of the mind? All organisms
have evolved out of one original germ, through
the .reciprocal action of organism and environ-
ment. The reason why animals have intelli-
gence, and plants none, is that animals move
about for their food, while plants take what
comes to them. Man has the highest intelli-
gence because he has the greatest wants and
the widest mobility; "beings without wants are
also without mind."

Though La Mettrie was exiled for these opin-
ions, Helvetius (1715-71), who took them as
the basis of his book On Man, became one of the
richest men in Prance, and rose to position and
honor. Here we have the ethic, as in La Met-
trie the metaphysic, of atheism. All action is
dictated by egoism, self-love; "even the nero
follows the feeling which for him is associated
with the greatest pleasure"; and "virtue is
egoism furnished with a spy-glass."* Conscience

*Taine, The Ancient Regime.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 59

is not the voice of God, but the fear of the
police; it is the deposit left in us by the stream
of prohibitions poured over the growing soul
by parents and teachers and press. Morality
must be founded not on theology but on sociol-
ogy; the changing needs of society, and not any
unchanging revelation or dogma, must deter-
mine the good.

The greatest figure in this group was Denis
Diderot (1713-84). His ideas were expressed in
various fragments from his own pen, and in
the System of Nature of Baron d'Holbach (1723-
89), whose salon was the center of Diderot's
circle. "If we go back to the beginning,,, says
Holbach, "we shall find that ignorance and fear
created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm or de-
ceit adorned or disfigured them; that weakness
worships them; that credulity preserves them;
and that custom respects and tyranny supports
them in order to make the blindness of men
serve its own interests. " Belief in God, said
Diderot, is bound up with submission to autoc-
racy; the two rise and fall together; and "men
will never be free till the last king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest." The earth
will come into its own only when heaven is de-
stroyed. Materialism may be an over-simplifi-
cation of the world — all matter is probably in-
stinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce
the unity of consciousness to matter and mo-
tion; but materialism is a good weapon against

60 VOLTA1R] THE

the Church, and must be used till a better one
is found. Meanwhile one must spread knowl-
edge and encourage industry; industry will
make for peace, and knowledge will make a new
and natural morality.

These are the ideas which Diderot and d'Alem-
bert labored to disseminate through the great
EmycJopedie which they issued, volume by vol-
ume, from 1752 to 1772. The Church had the
first volumes suppressed; and as the opposition
increased, Diderot's comrades abandoned him;
but he worked on angrily, invigorated by his
rage. "I know nothing so indecent, " he said,
"as these vague declamations of the theologians
against reason. To hear them one would sup-
pose that men could not enter into the bosom- of
Christianity except as a herd of cattle enters
a stable." It was, as Paine put it, the age of
reason; these men never doubted that the in-
tellect was the ultimate human test of all truth
and all good. Let reason be freed, they said,
and it would in a few generations build Utopia.
Diderot did not suspect that the erotic and
neurotic Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-7S).
whom he had just introduced to Paris, was
carrying in his head, or in his heart, the seeds
of a revolution against this enthronement of
reason; a revolution which, armed with the
impressive obscurities of Immanuel Kant, would
soon capture every citadel of philosophy.

Naturally enough, Voltaire, who was inter-

RKNCH EXL1GHTEXME

ested in everything., and had a hand in e
fight, was caught up for a time in the circle of
the Encyclopedists; they were glad to call him
their leader; and he was not averse to their
incense, though he thought some of their ideas
need:! a little pruning. They asked him to
write articles for their great undertaking, and
he responded .with a facility and fertility which
delighted them. When he had finished thi*
work he set about making an encyclopedia of
his own, which he called a Philosophic Diction-
ary; with unprecedented audacity he took sub-
ject after subject as the alphabet suggested
them, and poured out under each heading part
of his inexhaustible resources of knowledge and
wisdom. Imagine a man writing on everything.
and producing a classic none the less; the most
readable and sparkling of Voltaire's works aside
from his romances; every article a model of
brevity, clarity, and wit. "Some men can be
prolix in one small volume; Yoltair
through a hundred."'1 Here at last Voltaire
proves that he is a philosopher.

He begins, like Bacon, Descartes and Locke
and all the moderns, with doubt and a (sup-
posedly) clean slate. "I have taken as my
patron saint St. Thomas of Didymus, who al-
ways insisted on an examination with his own
hands."! He thanks Bayle for having taught

♦Robertson, ■

f Philosophic Dictionary :L ix,

62 VOLTAIRE AND THE

him the art of doubt. He rejects all systems,
and suspects that "every chief of a sect in
philosophy has been a little of a quack."* "The
further I go, the more I am confirmed in the
idea that systems of metaphysics are for phil-
osophers that novels are for women. "f "It is
only charlatans who are certain. We know
nothing of first principles. It is truly extrav-
agant to define God, angels, minds, and to know
precisely why God formed the world, when we
do not know why we move our arms at will.
Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but cer-
tainty is a ridiculous one."ff "I do not know
how I was made, and how I was born. I did
not know at all, during a quarter of my life,
the causes of what I saw, or heard, or felt.
... I have seen that which is called matter,
both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom
which can be perceived with the microscope;
and I do not know what this matter is."$

He tells a story of "The Good Brahmin," who
says, "I wish I had never been born!"

"Why so?" said I.

"Because," he replied, "I have been studying
these forty years, and I find that it has been so
much time lost. ... I believe that I am composed
of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy
myself what it is that produces thought. I am
even ignorant whether my understanding is a sim-
ple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or
if I think with my head in the same manner as

*Ibid., 42.

tin Pellissier, 11, note.

11 Robertson, 122.

XDictionary, article "Ignorance."

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 63

I take hold of a thing with my hands .... I talk
a great deal, and when I have done speaking I
remain confounded and ashamed of what I have
said."

The same day I had a conversation with an old
woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever
been unhappy for not understanding how her soul
was made? She did not even comprehend my
question. She had not, for the briefest moment
in her life, had a thought about these subjects with
which the good Brahmin had so tormented him-
self. She believed in the bottom of her heart in
the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she
could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges
in which to make her ablutions, she thought her-
self the happiest of women. Struck with the hap-
piness of this poor creature, I returned to my phil-
osopher, whom I thus addressed :

"Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when,
not fifty yards from you, there is an old auto-
maton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"

"You are right." he replied. "I have said to
myself a thousand times that I should be happy if
I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor ; and
yet it is a happiness which I do not desire."

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater im-
pression on me than anything that had passed.*

Even if Philosophy should end in tttal doubt
and Montaigne's ''Que sais-jef'i it is man's
greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us
learn to be content with modest advances in
knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new
systems out of our mendacious imagination.

We must not say, Let us begin by inventing prin-
ciples whereby we may be able to explain every-
thing ; rather we must say, Let us make an exact
analysis of the matter, and then we shall try to
see, with much diffidence, if it fits in with any

*Romances, 450 f.
t'What do I know?"

f!4 VOLTAIRE AND THE

principle.* .... The Chancellor Bacon had shown
the road which science might follow .. . . But then
Descartes appeared and did just the contrary of
what he should have done : instead of studying
nature, he wished to divine her .... This best of
mathematicians made only romances in philoso-
phyt .... It is given us to calculate, to weigh,
to measure, to observe ; this is natural philosophy ;
almost all the rest is chimera.^

*Tn Pellissi^r. 28. note.

^Voltaire's Prose, e<L Conn and Woodward;
Boston. 1918; p. 64.
rTn Pellissler, 29-30.

FRENCH E PENT

\in. ECRASEZ UINFAME.

Under ordinary circumstances it is probable
that Voltaire would never have passed out of
the philosophic calm of this courteous scepti-
cism to the arduous controversies of his later
years. The aristocratic circles in which he
moved agreed so readily with his point of view
that there was no incentive to polemics; even
the priests smiled with him over the difficulties
of the faith, and cardinals considered whether.
after all, they might not yet make him into a
good Capuchin. What were the events that
turned him from the polite persiflage of agnos-
ticism to a bitter anti-clericalism which admit-
ted no compromise, but waged relentless war to
"crush the infamy" of ecclesiastic ism?

Not far from Ferney lay Toulouse, the sev-
enth city of France. In Voltaire's day the
Catholic clergy enjoyed absolute sovereignty
there; the city commemorated with frescoes the
Revocation of the Edrct of Nantes (an edict
which had given freedom of worship to Protes-
tants), and celebrated as a great feast the day
of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. No Prot-
estant in Toulouse could be a lawyer, or a
physician, or an apothecary, or a grocer, or a
book-seller, or a printer; nor could a Catholic

06 VOLTAIRE AND THE

keep a Protestant servant or clerk — in 1748 a
woman had been fined 3,000 francs (an impres-
sive sum in those days) for using a Protestant
midwife.

Xow it happened that Jean Calas, a Prot-
estant of Toulouse, had a daughter who became
a Catholic, and a son who hanged himself, pre-
sumably because of disappointment in business.
There was a law in Toulouse that every suicide
should be placed naked on a hurdle, with face
down, drawn thus through the streets, and then
handed on a gibbet. The father, to avert this,
asked his relatives and his friends to testify
to a natural death. In consequence, rumor be-
gan to talk of murder, and to hint that tTie
father had killed the son to prevent his im-
minent conversion to Catholicism. Calas was
arrested, put to the torture, and died soon
after (1761). His family, ruined and hunted,
fled to Ferney, and sought the aid of Voltaire.
He took them into his home, comforted them,
and marveled at the story of medieval perse-
cution which they told.

About the same time (1762) came the death
of Elizabeth Sirvens; again rumor charged that
she had been pushed into a well just as she
was about to announce her conversion to Cathol-
icism. That a timid minority of Protestants
would hardly dare to behave in this way was
a rational consideration, and therefore out of
the purview of rumor. — In 1765 a young man

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT

by the name of La Barre, aged sixteen, was
arrested on the charge of having mutilated
crucifixes. Subjected to torture, he confessed
his guilt; his head was cut off, and his body
was flung into the flames, while the crowd ap-
plauded. A copy of Voltaire's Philosophic Dic-
tionary, which had been found on the lad, was
burned with him.

For almost the first time in his life, Voltaire
became a thoroughly serious man. When
d'Alembert, disgusted equally with state, church
and people, wrote that hereafter he would mere-
ly mock at everything, Voltaire answered, "This
is not a time for jesting; wit does not har-
monize with massacres. ... Is this the coun-
try of philosophy and pleasure? It is rather
the country of the Massacre of St. Bartholo-
mew." It was with Voltaire now as with Zola
and Anatole France in the case of Dreyfus; this
tyrannous injustice lifted him up; he ceased to
be merely a man of letters, became a man of ac-
tion, too; he laid aside philosophy for war, or
rather turned his philosophy into relentless
dynamite. "During this time not a smile
escaped me without my reproaching myself for
it as for a crime." It was now that he adopted
his famous motto, Ecrasez V in fame, and stirred
the soul of France against the abuses of the
church. He began to pcur forth such intellectual
fire and brimstone as melted mitres and scep-
tres, broke the power of the priesthood in

6S VOLTAIRE AND THE

Prance, and helped to overthrow a throne. He
sent out a call to his friends and followers,
summoning them to battle: "Come, brave Di-
derot, intrepid d'Alembert, ally yourselves;
. . . overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves,
destroy the insipid declamations, the miserable
sophistries, the lying history, . . . the ab-
surdities without number; do not let those who
have sense be subjected to those who have
none; and the generation which is being born
will owe to us its reason and its liberty."*

Just at this crisis an effort was made to buy
him off; through Mme. de Pompadour he re-
ceived an offer of a cardinal's hat as the reward
of reconcilation with the Church. t As if the
rule of a few tongue-tied bishops could interest
a man who was the undisputed sovereign of the
world of intellect! Voltaire refused; and like
another Cato, began to end all his letters with
"Crush the infamy." He sent out his Treatise
on Tolen~ation\ he said he would have borne
with the aburdities of dogma had the clergy
lived up to their sermons and had they tolerated
differences; but "subtleties of which not a trace
can be found in the Gospels are the source of
the bloody quarrels of Christian history."!!
"The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or
God will damn you/ will presently say, 'Believe

•Correspondence, Nov. 11, 1765.
tTallentyre, 319 ; questioned by some.
^Selected Works, p. 62.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 69

as I do, or I shall assassinate you.' "* "By what
right could a being created free force another to
think like himself?"t "A fanaticism composed
of superstition and ignorance has been the sick-
ness of all the centuries."!! No such perpetual
peace as the Abbe de St.-Pierre had pleaded for
could ever be realized unless men learned to
tolerate one another's philosophic, political and
religious differences. The very first ^step to-
wards social health was the destruction of the
ecclesiastical power in which intolerance had
its root.

The Treatise on Toleration was followed up
with a Niagara of pamphlets, histories, dia-
logues, letters, catechisms, diatribes, squibs,
sermons, verses, tales, fables, commentaries and
essays, under Voltaire's own name and under
a hundred pseudonyms — "the most astonishing
pell-mell of propaganda ever put out by one
man."J Never was philosophy phrased so clear-
ly, and with such life; Voltaire writers so well
that one does not realize that he is writing
philosophy. He said of himself, over-modestly,
"I express myself clearly enough: I am like
the little brooks, which are transparent because
they are not deep."|| And so he was read;
soon everybody, even the clergy, had his pam-

*lbid., 65.

^Essai sur les Moeurs; Prose Works, p. 14.
Vlbid., p. 26.
tRobertson, 112.
I In Sainte-Beuve, ii, 146.

70 VOLTAIRE AND THE

phlets; of some of them 300,000 copies were
sold, though readers were far fewer then than
now; nothing like it had ever been seen in the
history of literature. "Big books," he said, "are
out of fashion." And so he sent forth his little
soldiers, week after wTeek, month after month,
resolute and tireless, surprising the world with
the fertility of his thought and the magnificent
energy of his seventy years. As Helvetius put
it. Voltaire had crossed the Rubicon, and stood
before Rome.*

He began with a "higher criticism" of the
authenticity and reliability of the Bible; he
takes much of his material from Spinoza, more
of it from the English Deists, most of it from
the Critical Dictionary of Bayle (1647-1706);
but how brilliant and fiery their material be-
comes in his hands! One pamphlet is called
"The Questions of Zapata," a candidate for the
priesthood; Zapata asks, innocently, "Kow shall
we proceed to show that the Jews, whom we
burn by the hundred, were for four thousand
years the chosen people of God?"t — and he goes
on with questions which lay bare the incon-
sistencies of narrative and chronology in the
Old Testament. "When two Councils anathema-
tize each other, as has often happened, which of
them is infallible?" At last, "Zapata, receiving

♦In Pellissier, 101.

f Selected Works, p. 26. Voltaire himself was
something of an anti-Semite, chiefly because of his
not quite admirable dealings with the financiers.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 71

no answer, took to preaching God in all sim-
plicity. He announced to men the common
Father, the rewarder, punisher, and pardoner.
He extricated the truth from the lies, and sep-
arated religion from fanaticism; he taught and
practised virtue. He was gentle, kindly, and
modest; and he was burned at Valladolid in
the year of grace 1631."*

Under the article on "Prophecy" in the Phil-
osophic Dictionary, he quotes Rabbin Isaac's
Bulwark of Faith against the application of He-
brew prophecies to Jesus, and then goes on,
ironically: "Thus these blind interpreters of
their own religion and their own language, com-
bated with the Church, and obstinately main-
tained that this prophecy cannot in any manner
regard Jesus Christ. "t Those were dangerous
days, in which one was compelled to say what
one meant without saying it, and the shortest
line to one's purpose was anything but straight.
Voltaire likes to trace Christian dogmas and
rites to Greece, Egypt and India, and thinks
that these adaptations were not the least cause
of the success of Christianity in the ancient
world. Under the article on "Religion" he asks,
slyly, "After our own holy religion, which doubt-
less is the only good one, what religion would
be the least objectionable?" — and he proceeds to
describe a faith and worship directly opposed to

*Ibid., 26-35.
|IX, 21.

1-1 VOLTAIRE AND THE

the Catholicism of his day. "Christianity muit
be divine," he says, in one of his most unmea-
sured sallies, "since it has lasted 1,700 years
despite the fact that it is so full of villainy and
nonsense."* He shows how almost all ancient
peoples had similar myths, and hastily con-
cludes that the myths are thereby proved to
have been the inventions of priests: "the first
divine was the first rogue who met the first
fool." However, it is not religion itself which
he attributes to the priests, but theology. It is
slight differences in theology that have caused
so many bitter disputes and religious wars. "It
is not the ordinary people . . . who have
raised these ridiculous and fatal quarrels, the
sources of so many horrors. . . . Men fed by
your labors in a comfortable idleness, enriched
by your sweat and your misery, struggled for
partisans and slaves; they inspired you with a
destructive fanaticism, that they might be your
masters; they made you superstitious not that
you might fear God but that you might fear
them."f

Let it not be supposed from all this that Vol-
taire was quite without religion. He decisively
rejects atheism ;ff so much so that some of the
Encyclopedists turned against him, saying, "Vol-
taire is a bigot, he believes in God." In "The

*Esxai sur les Meeurs, part ii, ch 9 : in Morley
322.

t Selected Works, 63.

ffCf. The Sage and the Atheist, chs. 9 and 10.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 73

Ignorant Philosopher" he reasons towards
Spinozist pantheism, but then recoils from it as
almost atheism. He writes to Diderot:

I confess that I am not at all of the opinion of
Saunde-rson. who denies a God because he was
born sightless. I am, perhaps, mistaken ; but in
his place I should recognize a great Intelligence
who had given me so many substitutes for sight;
and perceiving, on reflection, the wonderful rela-
tions between all thfhgs, I should have suspected a
Workman infinitely able. If it is very presump-
tuous to divine what He is. and why He has made
everything that exists, so it seems to me very pre-
sumptious to deny that He exists. I am exceed-
ingly anxious to meet and talk with you, whether
you think yourself one of His works, or a particle
drawn, of necessity, from eternal and necessary
matter. Whatever you are, you are a worthy part
of that great whole which I do not understand.*

To Holbach he points out that the very title
of his book, the System of Nature, indicates a
divine organizing intelligence. On the other
hand he stoutly denies miracles and the super-
natural efficacy of prayer:

I was at the gate of the convent when Sister
Fessue said to Sister Confite : "Providence takes a
visible care of me ; you know how I love my spar-
row ; he would have been dead if I had not said
nine Ave-Marlas to obtain his cure." ... A meta-
physician said to her : "Sister, there is nothing so
good as Ave-Marias, especially when a grirl pro-
nounces them in Latin in the suburbs of Paris ; but
I cannot believe that God has occupied himself so
much with your sparrow, pretty as it is ; I pray you
to believe that he has other things to attend
to. . . ." Sister Fessue : "Sir, this discourse savors
of heresy. My confessor . . . will infer that yon
do not believe in Providence." Metaphysician: 'I
believe in a general Providence, dear Sister, whi< h

*Vo1taire in His Letters, p. tfl.

74 VOLTAIRE AND THE

has laid down from all eternity the law which gov-
erns all things, like light from the sun ; but I
believe not that a particular Providence changes
the economy of the world for your sparrow."* His
Sacred Majesty, Chance, decides everything.!

True prayer lies not in asking for a violation
of natural law but in the acceptance of natural
law as the unchangeable will of Godfl

Similarly, he denies free willj As to the
soul he is an agnostic: "Four thousand vol-
umes of metaphysics will not teach us what
the soul is."§ Being an old man, he would
like to believe in immortality, but he finds it
difficult.

Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to the
flea ; why then to an elephant, or a monkey, or my
valet?|| ... A child dies in its mother's womb, just
at the moment when it has received a soul. Will
it rise again foetus, or boy, or man? To rise again —
to be the same person that you were — you must
have your memory perfectly fresh and present ; for
it is memory that makes your identity. If your
memory be lost, how will you be the same man?**
. . . Why do mankind flatter themselves that they
alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal
principle? . . . Perhaps from their inordinate van-
ity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak
he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that
it inhabited his magnificent tail.***

And in this earlier mood he rejects also the
view that belief in immortality is necessary for

*Dictionary, art. "Providence."

tCorrespondence, Feb. 26, 1767.

^Romances, p. 412.

%The Ignorant Philosopher.

$ Dictionary, art. "Soul."

|| In Morley, ed. 1886; p. 28«.

** Dictionary, art. "Resurrection."

***Komances, p. 411.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 75

morality: the ancient Hebrews were without it,
just when they wrere the "chosen people"; and
Spinoza wras a paragon of morality.

In later days he changed his mind. He came
to feel that belief in God has little moral value
unless accompanied by belief in an immortality
of punishment and reward. Perhaps, "for the
common people (la canaille) a rewarding and
avenging God" is necessary. Bayle had asked,
If a society of atheists could subsist? — Voltaire
answers, "Yes, if they are also philosophers."*
But men are seldom philosophers; "if there is
a hamlet, to be good it must have a religion."!
"I want my lawyer, my tailor, and my wife to
believe in God," says "A" in "A, B, C"; "so, I
imagine, I shall be less robbed and less de-
ceived." "If God did not exist it would be
necessary to invent him."tl "I begin to put
more store on happiness and life than on
truth"; J — a remarkable anticipation, in the
midst of the Enlightenment, of the very doc-
trine with which Immanuel Kant was later to
combat the Enlightenment. He defends him-
self gently against his friends the atheists; he
addresses Holbach in the article on "God" in
the Dictionary:

You yourself say that belief in God . . . has kept
some men from crime ; this alone suffices me. When

♦In Pellissier, 169.
•^Dictionary, art. "Religion."
Ifln Pellissier, 172.
^Correspondence, Sept. 11, 1738.

76 VOLTAIRE AND THE

this belief prevents even ten assassinations, ten
calumnies, I hold that all the world should embrace
it Religion, you say, has produced countless mis-
fortunes ; say rather the superstition which reigns
on our unhappy globe. This is the crudest enemy
of the pure worship due to the Supreme Being. Let
us dotast this monster which has always torn the
fcosom of Its mother: those who combat it axe- the
fe#n*£aetors of the human race; it is a serpent
which chokes religion in its embrace; We must
crush its head without wounding tho mother whom
it devours,"

This distinction between superstition and re-
ligion is fundamental with him. He accepts
gladly the theology of the Sermon on the Mount,
and acclaims Jesus in tributes which could
hardly be matched even with the pages of
saintly ecstasy. He pictures Christ among the
sages, weeping over the crimes that have been
committed in his name. His profession of faith
in God seems to have been sincere; we see a
reference to himself when he makes an Athen-
ian say of Socrates, "Yes, that is the sage who
has no religion; that is the atheist who says
there is only one God."* At last he built his
own church, with the dedication, "Deo erexit
Voltaire"; the only church in Europe, he said,
that was erected to God. He addresses to God
a magnificent prayer; and in the article
"Theist" he expounds his faith finally and
clearly :

The theist is a man firmly persuaded of the ex-
istence of a supreme being as good as he is power-
ful, who has formed all things . . . ; who punishes,

^Dictionary, art. "Socrates."

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 7 7

without cruelty, all crimes, and recompenses with
goodness all virtuous actions . . . Reunited in this
principle with the rest of the universe, he does not
join any of the sects which all contradict one an-
other. His religion is the most ancient and the
most widespread ; for the simple worship of a God
preceded all the systems of the world. He speaks
a language which all peoples understand, while
they do not understand one another. He has
brothers from Pekin to Cayenne, and he counts
all the sages for his fellows. He believes that
religion consists neither in the opinions of an un-
intelligible metaphysic, nor in vain shows, but in
worship and in justice. To do good is his worship,
to submit to God is his creed. The Mohammedan
cries out to him, "Beware if you fail to make the
pilgrimage to Mecca !" — the priest says to him.
"Curses on you if you do not make the trip t<>
Notre Dame de Lorette !" He laughs at Loratte
and at Mecca ; but he succors the indigent and de-
fends the oppressed.

VOLTAIRE AND THE

IX. VOLTAIRE AND ROUSSEAU.

Voltaire was so engrossed in the struggle
against ecclesiastical tyranny that during the
later decades of his life he was compelled al-
most to withdraw from the war on political cor-
ruption and oppression. "Politics is not in my
line: I have always confined myself to doing
my little best to make men less foolish and
more honorable." He knew how complex a mat-
ter political philosophy can become, and he shed
his certainties as he grew. "I am tired of all
these people who govern states from the re-
cesses of their garrets";* "these legislators
who rule the world at two cents a sheet; . . .
unable to govern their wives or their house-
holds they take great pleasure in regulating the
universe."! It it impossible to settle these mat-
ters with simple and general formulae, or by
dividing all people into fools and knaves on
the one hand, and on the other, ourselves.
"Truth has not the name of a party"; and he
writes to Vauvenargues: "It is the duty of a
man like you to have preferences, but not
exclusions."!!

Being rich, he inclines towards conservatism,

♦Correpondence, Sept. 18, 1763.
tin Pellissier, 237, note, and 236.
{[Pellissier, 23 ; Morley, 86.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 70

for no worse reason than that which impels
the hungry man to call for a change. His
panacea is the spread of property: ownership
gives personality and an uplifting pride. 'The
spirit of property doubles a man's strength. It
is certain that the possessor of an estate will
cultivate his own inheritance better than that
of another."*

He refuses to excite himself about forms of
government. Theoretically he prefers a repub-
lic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions
which, if they do not bring on civil war, at
least destroy national unity; it is suited only
to small states protected by geographical sit-
uation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with
wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to
govern themselves." Republics are transient at
best; they are the first form of society, arising
from the union of families; the American In-
dians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full
of such democracies. But differentiation of
economic status puts an end to these egalitarian
governments; and differentiation is the inevit-
able accompaniment of development. "Which is
better," he asks, "a monarchy or a republic?"
— and he replies: "For four thousand years
this question has been tossed about. Ask the
rich for an answer — they all want aristocracy.
Ask the people — they wrant democracy. Only
the monarchs want monarchy. How then has it

•Dictionary, art. "Property."

80 VOl/TAlilE AND THE

come about that almost the entire earth is
governed by monarchs? Ask the rats who pro-
posed to nans a bell about the neck of the cat"*
But when a correspondent argues that mon-
archy is the best form of government he an-
swers: "Provided Marcus Aurelius is monarch;
fov otherwise, what difference does it make to
a poor man whether he is devoured by a lion
or by a hundred rats?"t

Likewise, he is almost indifferent to na-
tionalities, like a traveled man; he has hardly
any patriotism in the usual sense of that word.
Patriotism commonly means, he says, that one
hates every country but one's own. If a man
wishes his country to prosper, but never at the
expense of other countries, he is at the same
time an intelligent patriot and a citizen of the
universe. 1{ Like a "good European" he praises
England's literature and Prussia's king while
France is at war with both England and Prus-
sia. So long as nations make a practice of war.
he says, there is not much to choose among
them.

For he hates war above all else. "War iw the
greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no ag-
gressor who does not color his crime with the
pretext of justice."! "It is forbidden to kill;
therefore all murderers are punished unless

0 Dictionary, art. "Fatherland."
tCorrespondence, June 20, J. 77.
JPellissier. 222.
iThe Ignorant Philosopher,

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 81

they kill in large numbers and to the sound of
trumpets/'* He has a terrible "general Reflec-
tion on Man," at the end of the article on "Man"
in the Dictionary:

Twenty years are required to bring man from
the state of a plant, in which he exists in the womb
of his mother, and from the state of an animal,
which is his condition in infancy, to a state in
which the maturity of reason begins to make itself
felt. Thirty centuries were necessary in which to
discover even a little of his structure. An eternity
would be required to know anything of his soul.
But one moment suffices in which to kill him.

Does he therefore think of revolution as a
remedy? No. For first of all, he distrusts the
people: "When the people undertake to reason,
all is lost/'f The great majority is always too
busy to perceive the truth until change has
made the truth an error; and its intellectual
history is merely the replacement of one myth
by another. "When an old error is established,
politics uses it as a morsel which the people
have put into their own mouths, until another
superstition comes along to destroy this one,
and politics profits from the second error as it
did from the first."!! And then again, inequal-
ity is written into the very structure of society,
and can hardly be eradicated while men are
men and life is a struggle. "Those who say
that all men are equal speak the greatest truth

*Dictionary, art. "War."
•{-Correspondence, April 1, 1766.
rVo1.icii e'a Prose, p. 15.

82 VOLTAIRE AND THE

if they mean that all men have an equal right
to liberty, to the possession of their goods, and
to the protection of the laws"; but "equality is
at once the most natural and the most chim-
erical thing in the world: natural when it is
limited to rights, unnatural when it attempts
to level goods and powers."* "Not all citizens
can be equally strong; but they can all be
equally free; it is this which the English have
won. . . . To be free is to be subject to
nothing but the laws."t This was the note of
the liberals, of Turgot and Condorcet and Mira-
beau and the other followers of Voltaire who
hoped to make a peaceful revolution; it could
not quite satisfy the oppressed, who called not
so much for liberty as for equality, equality
even at the cost of liberty; Rousseau, voice of
the common man, sensitive to the class dis-
tinctions which met him at every turn, demand-
ed a leveling; and when the Revolution fell into
the hands of his followers, Marat and Robes-
pierre, equality had its turn, and liberty was
guillotined.

Voltaire was sceptical of Utopias to be fash-
ioned by human legislators who would create a
brand new world out of their imaginations.
Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in
logic; and when the past is put out through the
door it comes in at the window. The problem

•dictionary, art. "Equality."
'Art. "Government."

FRENCH EN BNT

is to show precisely by what changes we can
diminish misery and injustice in the world in
which we actually live.* In the "Historical
Eulogy of Reason," Truth, the daughter of
Reason, voices her joy at the accession of Louis
XVI, and her expectation of great reforms; to
which Reason replies: "My daughter, you know
well that I too desire these things, and more.
But all this requires time and thought. I am
always happy when, amid many disappoint-
ments, I obtain some of the amelioration I
longed for." Yet he too rejoiced when Turgot
came to power, and wrote: ""We are in the
golden age up to our necks !"+ — now would
come the reforms he had advocated: juries,
abolition of the tithe, an exemption of the poor
from all taxes, etc. And had he not written
that famous letter? —

Everything that I see appears to be throwing
broadcast the seed of a revolution which must
some day inevitably come, but which I shall not
have the pleasure of witnessing. The French al-
ways come late to things, but they do come at last.
Light extends so from neighbor to neighbor, that
there will be a splendid outburst on the first occa-
sion ; and then there will be a rare commotion !
The young are fortunate ; they will see fine things.tf

Yet he did not quite realize what was hap-
pening about him; and he never for a moment
supposed that in this "splendid outburst" all
France would accept enthusiastically the phil-

•PeUissier, 283.

Sainte-Beuve, i. 2 3 4.

rrespondence, April 2, 1764.

84 VOLTAIRE AND THE

osophy of this queer Jean Jacques Rousseau
who, from Geneva and Paris, was thrilling the
world with sentimental romances and revolu-
tionary pamphlets. The complex soul of France
seemed to have divided itself into these two
men, so different and yet so French. Nietzsche
speaks of "la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit,
fire, grace, strong logic, arrogant intellectuality,
the dance of the stars" — surely he was thinking
of Voltaire! Now beside Voltaire put Rous-
seau: all heat and fantasy, a man with noble
and jejune visions, the idol of la oourgeoise
gentile-femme, announcing like Pascal that the
heart has its reasons which the head can never
understand.

In these two men we see again the old clash
between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed
in reason always: "we can, by speech and pen,
make men more enlightened and better."*
Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired
action; the risks of revolution did not frighten
him; he relied on the sentiment of brotherhood
to re-unite the social elements scattered by tur-
moil and the uprooting of ancient habits. Let
laws be removed, and men would pass into a
reign of equality and justice. When he sent to
Voltaire his Discourse on the Origin of Inequal-
ity, with its arguments against civilization,
letters, and science, and for a return to the
natural condition as seen in savages and ani-

• Selected Works, 62.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 85

mals, Voltaire replied: "I have received, sir,
your new book against the human species, and
I thank you for it. . . . No one has ever been
so witty as you are in trying to turn us into
brutes; to read your book makes one long to go
on all fours. As, however, it is now some sixty
years since I gave up the practice, I feel that
it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume
it."* He was chagrined to see Rousseau's pas-
sion for savagery continue into the Social Con-
tract: "Ah, Monsieur," he writes to M. Bordes,
"you see now that Jean Jacques resembles a
philosopher as a monkey resembles a man."t
He is the "dog of Diogenes gone mad."ff Yet
he attacked the Swiss authorities for burning
the book, holding to his famous principle: "I
do not agree with a word that you say, but I
will defend to the death your right to say it."J
And when Rousseau was fleeing from a hun-
dred enemies Voltaire sent him a cordial invi-
tation to come and stay with him at Les De-
lices. What a spectacle that would have been!
Voltaire was convinced that all this denuncia-
tion of civilization was boyish nonsense; that
man was incomparably better off under civili-
zation than under savagery; he informs Rous-
seau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and
that civilized society means a chaining of this

•Correspondence, Aug. 30, 1755.
t/btd., Mar. 1765.
If In Sainte-Beuve, i. 230.
XVoltaire i?i His Letters, 65.

J C VOLTAIRE AND THE

beast, a mitigation of his brutality, and the
possibility of the development, through social
order, of the intellect and its joys. He agrees
that things are bad: "A government in which
it is permitted a certain class of men to say,
'Let those pay taxes who work; we should not
pay, because we do not work/ is no better than
a government of Hottentots." Paris has its re-
deeming features, even amidst its corruption.
In "The World as It Goes," Voltaire tells how
an angel sent Babouc to report on whether the
city of Persepolis should be destroyed; Babouc
goes, and is horrified with the vices he dis-
covers; but after a time "he began to grow
fond of a city the inhabitants of which were
polite, affable and beneficent, though they were
fickle, slanderous and vain. He was much
afraid that Persepolis would be condemned. He
was even afraid to give in his account. This
he did, however, in the following manner. He
caused a little statue, composed of different
metals, of earth and of stones (the most pre-
cious and the most vile) to be cast by one of
the best founders of the city, and carried it to
the angel. 'Wilt thou break/ said he, 'this
pretty statue because it is not wholly composed
of gold and diamonds?'" The angel resolved
to think no more of destroying Persepolis, but
to leave "the world as it goes." After all, when
one tries to change institutions without hav-

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 87

ing changed the nature of men, that unchanged
nature- will soon resurrect those institutions.
Here was the old vicious circle; men form
institutions, and institutions form men; where
could change break into this ring? Voltaire
and the liberals thought that intellect could
break the ring by educating and changing men,
slowly and peacefully; Rousseau and the radi-
cals felt that the ring could be broken only by
instinctive and passionate action that would
break down the old institutions and build, at
the dictates of the heart, new ones under which
liberty, equality and fraternity would reign.
Perhaps the truth lay above the divided camps:
that instinct must destroy the old, but that only
intellect can build the new. Certainly the seeds
of reaction lay fertile in the radicalism of Rous-
seau: for instinct and sentiment are ultimately
loyal to the ancient past which has begotten
them, and to which they are stereotyped adap-
tations: after the catharsis of revolution the
needs of the heart would recall supernatural re-
ligion and the "good old days" of routine and
peace; after Rousseau would come Chateau-
briand, and De Stael, and De Maistre, and Kant.

88 VOI/TAIRE AND THE

X. DENOUEMENT.

Meanwhile the old "laughing philosopher"
was cultivating his garden at Ferney; this "is
the best thing vre can do on earth." He had
asked for a long life: "my fear is that I shall
die before I have rendered service";* but surely
now he had done his share. The records of his
generosity are endless. "Everyone, far or near,
claimed his good offices; people consulted him,
related the wrongs of which they were the vic-
tims, and solicited the help of his pen and his
credit."t Poor people guilty of some misde-
meanor were his especial care; he would secure
a pardon for them and then set them up in
some honest occupation, meanwhile watching
and counselling them. When a young couple
who had robbed him went down on their knees
to beg his forgiveness, he knelt to raise them,
telling them that his pardon was freely theirs,
and that they should kneel only for God's. 1
One of his characteristic undertakings was to
bring up, educate, and provide a dowry for the
destitute niece of Corneille. "The little good I
have done," he said, "is my best work. . . .
When I am attacked I fight like a devil; I yield
to no one; but at bottom I am a good devil, and
I end by laughing.}:

•Correspondence, Aue:. 25, 1766.
tSainte-Beuve, i, 235.
{[Robertson, 71.

tlbid., 67.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 89

In 1770 his friends arranged a subscription to
have a bust made of him. The rich had to be
forbidden to give more than a mite, for thou-
sands asked the honor of contributing. Fred-
erick inquired how much he should give; he
was told, "A crown piece, sire, and your name."
Voltaire congratulated him on adding to his
cultivation of the other sciences this encour-
agement of anatomy by subscribing for the
statue of a skeleton. He demurred to the whole
undertaking on the ground that he had no face
left to be modeled. "You would hardly guess
where it ought to be. My eyes have sunk in
three inches; my cheeks are like old parch-
ment; . . . the few teeth I had are gone."
To which d'Alembert replied: "Genius . . .
has always a countenance which genius, its
brother, will easily find."* When his pet, Belle-
et-Bonne, kissed him, he said it was "Life kiss-
ing Death."

He was now eighty-three; and a longing came
over him to see Paris before he died. The
doctors advised him not to undertake so ardu-
ous a trip; but "if I want to commit a folly,"
he answered, "nothing will prevent me"; he had
lived so long, and worked so hard, that perhaps
he felt he had a right to die in his own way,
and in that electric Paris from which he had
been so long exiled. And so he went, weary
mile after weary mile, across France; and when

•Tallentyre, 497.

90 VOLTAIRE AND THE

his coach entered the capital his bones hardly
held together. He went at once to the friend of
his youth, d'Argental: "I have left off dying
to come and see you," he said. The next day
his room was stormed by three hundred visitors,
who welcomed him as a king; Louis XVI fretted
with jealousy. Benjamin Franklin was among
the callers, and brought his son for Voltaire's
blessing; the old man put his thin hands upon
the boy's head and bade him dedicate himself
to "God and Liberty."

He was so ill now that a priest came to shrive
him. "From whom do you come, M. TAbbe?"
asked Voltaire. "From God Himself," was the
answer. "Well, well, sir," said Voltaire; "your
credentials?"* The priest went away without
his prey. Later Voltaire sent for another abbe,
Gautier, to come and hear his confession; Gau-
tier came, but refused Voltaire absolution until
he should sign a profession of full faith in
Catholic doctrine. Voltaire rebelled; instead,
he drew up a statement which he gave to his
secretary, Wagner: "I die adoring God, loving
my friends, not hating my enemies, and detest-
ing superstition. (Signed) Voltaire. February
28, 1778."t

Though sick and tottering, he was driven to
the Academy, through tumultuous crowds that
clambered on his carriage and tore into sou-

*TaMentyre. 5°r>.

FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT 91

venirs the precious pelisse which Catherine of
Russia had given him. "It was one of the
historic events of the century. No great cap-
tain returning from a prolonged campaign of
difficulty and hazard crowned by the most glor-
ious victory, ever received a more splendid and
far-resounding greeting.,,* At the Academy he
proposed a revision of the French dictionary;
he spoke with youthful fire, and offered to un-
dertake all such part of the work as would come
under the letter A. At the close of the sitting
he said, "Gentlemen, I thank you in the name
of the alphabet.'' To which the chairman,
Chastellux, replied: "And we thank you in
the name of letters."

Meanwhile his play, Irene, was being per-
formed at the theatre; against the advice of
the physicians again, he insisted on attending.
The play was poor; but people marveled not
so much that a man of eighty-three should write
a poor play, but that he should write any play
at all; t and they drowned the speech of the
players with repeated demonstrations in honor
of the author. A stranger, entering, supposed
himself to be in a ♦madhouse, and rushed back,
frightened, into the street. If

When the old patriarch of letters went home
that evening he was almost reconciled to death.

•Morley, 262.
tTallentyre, 525.
If/bid., 045.

92 VOLTAIRE AND THE

He knew that he was exhausted now; that he
had used to the full that wild and marvelous
energy which nature had given to him perhaps
more than to any man before him. He strug-
gled as he felt life being torn from him; but
death could defeat even Voltaire. The end came
on May 30, 1778.

He was refused Christian burial in Paris; but
his friends sat him up grimly in a carriage, and
got him out of the city by pretending that he
was alive. At Scellieres they found a priebt
who understood that rules were not made for
geniuses; and the body was buried in holy
ground. In 1791 the National Assembly of th£
triumphant Revolution forced Louis XVI to re-
call Voltaire's remains to the Pantheon. The
dead ashes of the great flame that had been
were escorted through Paris by a procession of
100,000 men and women, while 600,000 flanked
the streets. On the funeral car were the words:
"He gave the human mind a great impetus; he
prepared us for freedom." On his tombstone
only three words were necessary:

HERE LIES VOLTAIRE.

TATTLE BLUE BOOK SERIES

Other Little Blue Books

Drama

383 The Creditor. Strindberg.
3S4 Four One -Act Piays.

Strindberg.
462 Everyman. A Morality Play.
418 The Bacchantes. Euripides.
335 Land of Heart's Desire.

Yeats.
229 Les Precieuses Ridicules

(English). Moliere.
809 Nobody Who Apes Nobility

(Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme)

(English). Moliere.
371 Empedocles on Etna,

Arnold.
376 Woman of No Importance.

Wilde.
354 The League of Youth. Ibsen.
353 Doll's House. Ibsen.

302 Wild Duck. Ibsen.

303 Rosmersholm. Ibsen.
350 Hedda Gabler. Ibsen.

295 The Master Builder. Ibsen.

80 PiHars of Society. Ibsen.

16 Ghosts. Henrik Ibsen.
337 Pippa Passes. Browning.

378 Maid of Orleans. Samuels.

379 The King Enjoys Himself.
Hugo.

396 Embers. Haldeman -Julius.
90 The Mikado. W. S. Gilbert.
31 Pelleas and Melisande.

Maeterlinck.
316 Prometheus Bound.

Aeschylus.
308 She Stoops to Conquer.

Oliver Goldsmith.
134 The Misanthrope. Moliere.
99 Tartuffe. Moliere.
46 Salome. Oscar Wilde.
54 Importance of Being
Earnest. O. Wilde.
8 Lady Windermere's Fan.
O. Wilde.
131 Redemption. Tolstoi.
226 The Anti-Semites.
Schnitzler.

Shakespeare's Plays

359 The Man Shakespeare.
Vol. 1. Frank Harris.

Man Shakespeare.

Vol. 2. Harris.

Man Shakespeare.

Vol. 3. Harris.

Man Shakespeare.

Vol. 4. Harris.

The Tempest.

Merry Wives of Windsor.

As You Like It.

Twelfth Night.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Measure for Measure.

Hamlet.

Macbeth.

King Henry V.

Julius Caesar.

Romeo and Juliet.

Midsummer Night's Dream.

Othello. The Moor of Venice.

King Henry VIII.

Taming cf the Shrew.

King Lear.

Venus and Adonis.

King Henry IV. Part I.

King Henry IV. Part IT,

King Henry VI. Part I

King Henry VI. Part II

King Henry VI. Part III

Comedy of Errors.

King John.

King Richard III.

King Richard II.

Pericles.

Merchant of Venice.

Lecture on Shakespeare.

Ingersoll.

Fiction

4S2 Five Weeks in a Balloon.

Verne.
485 A Voyage to the Moon.

Verne.
454 The Unworthy Coopers.

Haldeman- Julius.
483 The Privateersman.

Capt. Marryatt.
392 Nurnberg Stove. Ouida.
420 Great Spanish Stories.

385 Chelkash. Gorki.

386 Creatures That Once Were
Men. Gorki.

389 My Fellow Traveler. Gorki

64

LITTLE BLUE BOOK SERIES

G. B. Shaw.
135 Socialism for Millionaires.
61 Tolstoi's Essays.

176 Four Essays. Havelock
Ellis.

75 Choice of Books. Carlyle.
28S Essays on Chesterfield and

Rabelais. Sainte-Beuve.

76 The Prince of Peace.
W. J. Bryan.

86 On Reading. Brandes.
95 Confessions of An Opium
Eater. De Quincy.

177 Subjection of Womett
J. S. Mill.

17 On Walking. Tho.o^^
70 Charles Lamb's Essays.
235 Essays.

Gilbert K. ChestertoD
7 A Liberal Education

Thos. Huxley.
233 Thoughts on Literature

and Art. Goethe.
225 Condescension in Foreigners.

Ivowell.
'j.21 Women, and Other Essays,

Maeterlinck.
10 Shelley. Francis Thompson.
289 Pepys' Diary.
299 Prose Nature Notes.

Whitman.
315 Pen. Pencil and Poison,

Wilde.
313 The Decay of Lying.

Oscar Wilde.
36 Soul of Man Under

Socialism. Wilde.
293 Francois VilWn: Student,

Poet and Housebreaker.

Stevenson.
213 Lecture on Lincoln.

Ingersoll.

Maxims & Epigrams

444 Epigrams of Remy De

Gourraont.
402 Epigrams of George Moore.

77 What Great Men Have Said
About Women.

304 What Great Women Have

Said About Men.
179 Gems From Emerson.
310 The Wisdom of Thackeray.
193 Wit and Wisdom of Charles

Lamb.
197 Witticisms and Reflections,

De Eevigue.

ISO

155
181
228
168

59

35
154

56
106
478
479
388
401
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
348

Epigrams of Geo. Bernard
Shaw.

Maxims. Napoleon.
Epigrams. Thoreau.
Aphorisms. Huxley.
Epigrams. Oscar Wilde.
Epigrams of Wit and
Wisdom.

Maxims. Rochefoucauld.
Epigrams of Ibsen.
Wisdom of Ingersoll.
Aphorisms. George Sand.
Sanskrit Proverbs.
Proverbs of Germany.
Proverbs of Hindustan.
Proverbs of India,
Proverbs of England.
Proverbs of France.
Proverbs of Japan.
Proverbs of China.
Proverbs of Italy.
Proverbs of Russia.
Proverbs of Ireland.
Proverbs of Spain.
Proverbs of Arabia.
Proverbs of Scotland.
Proverbs of Yugoslavia.

Music

(Note: In the operatic titles
listed below, Mr. von Keler
gives short biographical sketches,
the story of the opera and help-
ful criticism of the music, illus-
trated by excerpts from the
score. )

440 Cavalleria Rusticana.
Von Keler.

441 I Pagliacci. Von Keler.

456 Carmen. Von Keler.

457 Lohengrin. Von Keler.

458 Tannhauser. Von Keler.

459 Das Rheingold. Von Keler.

Philosophy and
Religion

47t Guide to Kant. Thomas.
421 Yoga Philosophy.

Carrington.
448 Guide to Francis Baron.

Dtirant
477 Thoosophy in Outline. Willis

LITTLE BLUE BOOK SERIES

95

History and
Biography

490 Life of Michelangelo.

Moritzen.
370 Fatuer Damien. Stevenson,

468 History of Architecture.
Sheehan.

469 The Egypt of Yesterday; A
History of Exploring and
Excavation. Moritzen.

393 Life of Frederick the Great
Macaulay.

403 History of Music. Sheehan.
387 History of Painting.

SheeharL
429 Life and Work3 of Swift

Gunn.

394 BoswpII's Life of Johnson-
Finger.

433 Lift of Marat. Gottschalk.
436 Ibsen: His Life Aim and
Influence. Moritzen.

395 Autobiography of CellinL
Finger.

412 Mahomet. Finger.
34 Mystery of Iron Mask.

Von Keler.
432 Tragic Story of Oscar

Wilde's Life, Finger.
340 Life of Jesus. Ernest Ren an.
141 Life of Napoleon. Finger.
183 Life of Jark London.

269 Contemporary Portraits.
Vol. 1. Frank Harris.

270 Contemporary Portraits.
VoL 2. Frank Harris.

271 Contemporary Portraits.
Vol. 3. Frank Harris.

272 Contemporary Portraits.
Vol. 4. Frank Harris.

328 Joseph Addison and His

Time, Finger.
312 Life and Works of Laurenre

Sterne. Gunn.
324 Life of Lincoln. Bowers.
323 The Life of Joan of Arc,
339 Thoreau — the Man Who

Escaped From the Herd.

Finger.
126 History of Rome.

A. F. Giles.
128 Julius Caesar: WhoHeWa
185 History of Printing.
149 Historic Crimes and

Criminals. Finger.

175

104

52
125

22
142

343

66

287
51

147
836

83

163

214
276

144

233

227

156

170

123
139

G3

300

Science of History. Froude.

Battie of Waterloo.

victor Hugo.

Voltaire. Victor Hugo

J} ar Speeches »f Woodrow

T> llson.

Tolstoy: His Life and Workj

SerCk and the German

When the Puritans Were in

Life of Columbus.

Crimes of the Borgias

Dumas.

Whistler. The Man and His

Work.

Bruno: His Life and

Martyrdom.

Cromwell and His Time*.

SVvn?"1 Affai*

Paine's Common Sens*
vindication of Paine
Ingersoll.

grann: Smasher of Sham/
Rome in Greece and
Speeches of Lincoln.
Speeches and Letters of
George Washington.
Was Poe Immoral?
Whitman.

Essays on Swinburne
Keats. The Man and His
A\orK.

Lost Civilizations. Fin<?e'
Constantine and the Begin-
nings of Christianity.
Satan and the Saints.
Church History.
H. M. Titchenor.
Life of Shakespeare and
Analysis of His Plays.
Life of Madame Du Barry.
Life of Dante.
Life of Mary, Queen of
Scots. Dumas.
Life of Samuel Johnson.
Macaulny.

Trial of William Perm.
Terrorism In France.
Dumas.

Humor

Wit and Wisdom of
Dickens. Swasey.

90

LITTLE BLUB BOOK SKRTKS

382 Humor and Wisdom of

Lincoln. Gunn.
369 Artemus Ward's Travels.
368 To California and Back.

Artemus Ward.
291 Jumping Frog and Other

Humorous Tales.

Mark Twain.
166 English as She Is Spoke.

Mark Twain.
231 Eight Humorous Sketches.

Mark Twain.
18 Idle Thoughts of an Idle

Fellow. Jerome.
205 Artemus Ward. His Book.
187 Whistler's Humor.
216 Wit of Heinrich Heine.

Geo. Eliot
20 Let's Laugh. Nasby.

Literature

356 An Essay on Toe. Stedman.
487 Carlyle's Philsosphy of
Clothes. Smith.

472 The Strange Notes of Sam-
uel Butler. Gunn.

473 Essays on Euripides.
Alexander Harvey.

422 Dante: An Aesthetic View.

Isaac Goldberg.
411 Guide to Cervantes.

Isaac Goldberg.
867 Essay on Conversation.

De Quinrey.
373 Truth of Masks. Wilde.

874 Critic as Artist. Part 1.
Wilde.

875 Critic as Artist. Part 2.
Wilde.

413 Need for Art in Life.
Holborn.

448 Essays on Montaigne. Pascal
and Voltaire. Powys.

449 Essays on Rousseau, Balzac
and Hugo. Powys.

450 Essays on Pe Maupassant,
Anatole France and William
Blake. Powys.

451 Essays on Rem.y He Gour-
mont and Byron. Powys.

152 Essays on Emily Bronte and
Henry James. Powvs.

453 Essays on Joseph Conrad
and Osr-ar WPde. Pcwys.

461 Literary Essays.

K. Ualdeman-.lulius.

464 Is Progress an Ifhasioiif

E. Ha ldeman -Julius.
460 Miscellaneous Essay3.

E. Haldeman-Julius.
475 Essays on Aeschylus.

Harvey.
474 Essays on Sophocles.

Harvey.

433 Representative Men. VoL 1.
Emerson.

424 Representative Men. Vol. 2,
Emerson.

425 Representative Men. Vol. 3.
Emerson.

126 Representative Men. Vol. 4.
Emerson.

434 Significance of Ceorg
Brandes. Moritzen.

442 Oscar Wilde in Outline.
Finger.

305 MaohiavellL Lord Macaulay

358 Virginibus Pueriscjie.
Stevenson.

431 Literary Stars on Scandin-
avian Firmament. Moritzen.

435 Hundred Best Books.
Powvs.

109 Dante and Other Waning
Classics. Vol. 1. Mordell

110 Dante and Other Waning
Classics. Vol. 2. Mordell.

349 An Apology for Idlers.

Stevenson.
355 Aucassin and Nico^ete. Laiig
278 Friendship and Other

Essays. Thoreau.
195 Thoughts on Mature.

Thoreau.
220 England in Shakespeare's

Time. Finger.
194 Lord Chesterfield's Letters.
63 A Defense of Poetry. Shelley
97 Love Letters of King Henry
VIII.
3 Eighteen Essavs. Voltaire.
28 Toleration. Voltaire.
89 Love Letters of Men and
Women of Genius.
186 How I Wrote "The Raven."

Poe.
87 Love, an Essay. Montaigne.
48 Bacon's Essays.
60 Emerson's
84 Love Letters of a Portuguese

Nun
26 On Going to Church
G. B.